The collection of monument photographs (dating from 1890 onwards) was first compiled by Georgina Herrmann, director of the International Merv Project. Part of the archive was published in 1999 (Herrmann 1999), and an enlarged collection was published in 2002, including a CD-ROM with low/medium resolution digital copies of the images (Herrmann et al. 2002). Since 2001 the Ancient Merv Project has added new images of the monuments, in particular showing their current condition and conservation work, and more detailed metadata for each of the photographs has been assembled. The database currently consists of 1,984 photographs of the numerous historic monuments in the Merv delta. Each of the photographs has the following fields:
File Name: The name of the digital file. Each monument has its own distinctive filename followed by a number: e.g. SS013.tiff is the thirteenth photograph for the Mausoleum of Sultan Sanjar.
Place: The name of the place within the Merv delta where the monument is located: e.g. Sultan Kala.
Monument: The common name of the monument.
Year of photograph: The year in which the photograph or image was originally taken.
Type of photograph: The type of photograph in the digital archive: i.e. digital image (image originally captured as digital photograph), scanned image (scan of colour transparency), or scanned black and white photograph (scan of a print).
Creator: The person (or organisation) who took/created the photograph or image.
Copyright notice: The copyright owner of the photograph or image.
Description: Short description/caption for photograph.
File size: The digital size of the file in KB or MB.
File type: Either TIFF or JPG.
Source: Where applicable, the name of the publication and page reference from where the image originates from.
Category: The category of the monument: e.g. Icehouse, Mausoleum, or Pavilion.
Keywords: Keywords to index monument function.
City: All monuments are located in the Merv delta. This field is used for integration with larger data sets.
Country: All monuments are located in Turkmenistan. This field is used for integration with larger data sets.
The metadata was assigned by making use of the software programme I-View Multimedia Pro 3.1.2 and exported in Unicode UTF-8, comma separated, as text documents.