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Excellencies, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am Lois de Menil, President of the Center for Khmer Studies, the American Research
Center in Cambodia, for over 12 years. CKS’s mission is to serve as a place of encounter between Cambodian scholars and scholars from American universities, French universities, and those of many other countries. CKS collaborates with Khmer universities in training programs for their students and scholars, runs public lecture programs in
Phnom Penh and Siem Reap, and publishes an academic journal and scholarly books translated into Khmer. And much more.
I am about to tell you the story of how this remarkable project at the National Museum of
Cambodia began. Like many human accomplishments, it involves a challenge and an opportunity that came about, in this case, through the surprise of a visit to the National
Museum seven years ago.
A member of the CKS Board of Directors, Emma Bunker, Curator of Asian Art at the
Denver Art Museum in the US, invited her good friend, Mrs. Shelby White, to accompany her on a visit to Cambodia, where she took her to the CKS library and campus in Siem

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Reap and also to the National Museum in Phnom Penh. Shelby White is a prominent
American philanthropist, a Trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and a major collector of Roman and Greek ancient sculpture. Her husband, Leon Levy founded the Leon Levy Foundation, which sponsors the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. After viewing with Emma Bunker the remarkable collection of the
National Museum of Cambodia, whose depth and cultural value she recognized, Shelby
White met its Director, Hab Touch, and an Australian scholar, Darryl Collins, who was, at the time, training Museum staff to update the catalogue. Impressed as she was by the
Museum’s collection, Shelby White asked the Director what she could possibly do to help the Museum. He replied that the Museum’s greatest need was to put its catalogue and inventory in order. After several months of discussion, the CKS-National Museum of
Cambodia Inventory Project, funded by the Leon Levy Foundation, came into being.
Darryl Collins became its Project Director.
The first stage of three years involved Darryl Collins’ training a team from the Museum
Staff to photograph digitally every object in the Museum’s collection and to record it on a central computer, along with provenance and whatever was known about the object—the work of a curator. Previous records had been kept by hand since the days of Georges
Groslier, who was its first Conservator.. Old photographs were often on glass plates, or

brown negatives, sometimes missing, sometimes misidentified. Every object was relabeled,
3 photographed and electronically recorded. Scattered pieces were reassembled in the process, and the storage was reorganized into a modern, orderly, easily accessible system.
This was really a heroic job. It put the entire collection into computer files. But how to access those files? If you wished to find all the sculptures of Vishnu from the 9 th century, for instance, you would have had to look patiently through the entire catalogue to identify them. After the first phase of the project, therefore, came the second: making the new database interactive and therefore accessible. A second phase of three years began.
The difficulty of making the catalogue database searchable was compounded by the fact that it was in three languages—French, Khmer and English. Creating the software to address this complexity occupied a good part of the next year. During all of this time, CKS remained in close touch with the Leon Levy Foundation, informing them of costs and deadlines, and thanks to Darryl Collins excellent management, holding to both the budget and the time targets of the project. Today, at the end of 6 years, we celebrate the completion of this project by posting the National Museum of Cambodia’s catalogue online, on the World Wide Web. Not only Museum personnel, but Cambodians with computers and scholars around the world will now be able to sit at their computers and see the images of the exceptional objects in the Museum’s collection, photographed from all angles and

with all the information currently in Museum files. The next job of the curators will be to
4 expand on what is known about the objects by continuous documentation. The National
Museum staff is now professionally trained to continue documenting the collection on its own.
Thanks to that visit seven years ago of Shelby White and Emma Bunker, and the
Leon Levy Foundation’s steadfast commitment to the project, the National Museum of
Cambodia joins the great museums of the world in entering the digital age. CKS wishes to congratulate the Museum’s project staff and project director Darryl Collins-- who is also a member of the CKS Board of Directors-- for a job well done. We at CKS are proud of what has been accomplished, and look forward to a next phase, in which the cataloguing will be extended to the provincial museums. When this national catalogue is completed, the
Director will also be able to identify how many objects, once in the museum collections, are now missing. Hopefully, this should assist in recovering Cambodia’s treasures lost over recent years. In carrying out this project, CKS has enjoyed the full support of three
National Museum Directors. [Names] We salute them, as well as the Museum’s staff for this remarkable accomplishment.
And that is my story.