It is run out of the University of Pennsylvania's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and funded by both private donors and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
[1] The project began under the direction of Åke W. Sjöberg (1924–2014) and Erle Leichty in 1974 and was modeled on the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, itself begun in 1921.
[5] In April 2002, the project received a two-year US $302,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities,[4][7][6] though Tinney subsequently stated that because the dictionary project had changed into more of a process with no end date, they could no longer ask for federal funds, and instead would try to establish two permanent research positions for the dictionary with US$ 3,000,000 in donations.
[8] The new version of the dictionary includes listings of over 12,000 Sumerian words, phrases and names, occurring in almost 100,000 distinct forms a total of over 2.27 million times.
The resource contains a glossary, corpus and catalogue, sign list, index to literature, and a variety of articles about Sumerian.