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The SBL has launched the International Cooperation Initiative (ICI) to foster biblical scholarship and to facilitate mutual cooperation among colleagues.
After collecting survey responses from scholars around the world, a Task Force came together to formulate recommendations for SBL action in each of the Society’s program areas (Membership, Publications, the Profession, and Congresses).
As the recommendations are put into action you will find links from this page to the pages on which the new programs in each area are posted.
Publications & The Professions: Online Books page
The first project of the ICI was to provide free electronic access to selected SBL publications to scholars and students in underresourced countries. The system identifies the IP address of a visitor in a country whose Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita is substantially lower than the average of the GDP per capita of the USA and European Union and displays the book selections to those visitors as PDF files which can be downloaded at no charge. Additional books are posted monthly to the site.
SBL encourages participation in scholarly conferences and workshops worldwide. Events sponsored by SBL as well as those independent of SBL are listed on the Calendar of Events for Biblical and Religious Studies. Please contact Tech Support to provide information related to your event so that it can be included on the calendar.
SBL is establishing databases that will facilitate scholarly exchange. Scholars who are interested in and willing to (co)supervise and generally mentor students in institutions outside their home country or who would like to teach in another country when they have sabbaticals or travel time will be listed in one database. Schools that are interested in these types of cooperative efforts will be listed in a separate database. Individual scholars and schools will then have the information needed to contact each other and make their own arrangements. The SBL will not be responsible for any arrangements made by these parties. The SBL, as the host of these databases, will take reasonable steps to protect the privacy of the individuals who offer their services through these databases. Scholars and institutions that wish to participate should provide contact information to the ICI staff representative, Leigh Andersen .
In addition to the Online Books project, the ICI has established eight other objectives that are enumerated in the 2007 SBL Society Report . An Advisory Board consisting of scholars from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific Islands is operating through a listserv managed through the University of Alberta.
Anyone interested in participating in the work of the ICI Advisory Board should contact one of the Task Force members: Ehud Ben Zvi (chair), Saul Olyan, and Leigh Andersen (SBL staff). Questions and comments are also welcomed. You may wish to refer to articles previously published in the SBL Forum which served to precipitate this initiative:
Ehud Ben Zvi, The Future of the Society
Gerald West, The Future of the Society
Kent Harold Richards, The Future of SBL: Dialogue with Members
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