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Perseus Digital Library
The Perseus Digital Library, formerly known as the Perseus Project, is a free-access digital library founded by Gregory Crane in 1987 and hosted by the Department of Classical Studies of Tufts University. One of the pioneers of digital libraries, its self-proclaimed mission is to make the full record of humanity available to everyone. While originally focused on the ancient Greco-Roman world, it has since diversified and offers materials in Arabic, Germanic, English Renaissance literature, 19th century American documents and Italian poetry in Latin, and has sprouted several child projects and international cooperation. The current version, Perseus 4.0, is also known as the Perseus Hopper, and is mirrored by the University of Chicago.
The Perseus Digital Library was created to provide access to materials of the history of humanity to everyone, with Gregory Crane, the editor-in-chief of the library, stating that "access to the cultural heritage of humanity is a right, not a privilege".
This notably means that the Perseus Digital Library tries not to be exclusive to academics but aims to be accessible to everyone. To reflect this, the library supports open-source content and has published its code on SourceForge. The website is written in Java, uses sustainable formats such as XML and JPEG, and includes native support for the Greek, Latin and Arabic alphabets. It allows users to download all materials that belong to the public domain along with the Creative Commons rights information that specify their conditions of use. While automated downloading is not authorized, in order to protect items subject to intellectual property, the library offers download packages to the public.
The Perseus Digital library also adheres to sets of standards edified by other projects. It follows the norms of the Text Encoding Initiative for its XML mark-up. In the same vein, the library has applied the Canonical Text Services (CTS) protocol regarding citations to its classical Greek-Latin corpus.
Following this philosophy, Perseus chooses to use copyright-free texts, be it in the primary readings or in their translations and commentaries. For these reasons, the texts hosted necessarily date at the latest from the 19th and early 20th century, and must be divided into books, chapters and sections to be displayed individually. As such, those translations and commentaries can be outdated compared to the current state of the research, which can prove problematic when most of the now canonically accepted versions of ancient texts were established and sectioned later, during the 20th century. Perseus however tries to make rare and out-of-print materials accessible, and, for some texts, the material one can find on the website is the only one that was produced, which makes it especially valuable to scholars.
Some content is restricted by intellectual property license agreements with the holders of the rights to that material. This is notably the case for the pictures of artifacts that come from partnership with museums.
The Perseus Library is one of the first digital libraries to have been created, and is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field and a role model of other similar initiatives.
The Perseus Library first originated as a branch of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, from a full-text retrieval tool on Ancient Greek materials made by Gregory Crane, who became the editor-in-chief of the project ever since it was created. The goal of the library was to provide a wider access to knowledge, past the academical field; to quote the mission statement, "to make a full record of humanity, as intellectually accessible as possible, to every human being, regardless of linguistic or cultural background".
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Perseus Digital Library
The Perseus Digital Library, formerly known as the Perseus Project, is a free-access digital library founded by Gregory Crane in 1987 and hosted by the Department of Classical Studies of Tufts University. One of the pioneers of digital libraries, its self-proclaimed mission is to make the full record of humanity available to everyone. While originally focused on the ancient Greco-Roman world, it has since diversified and offers materials in Arabic, Germanic, English Renaissance literature, 19th century American documents and Italian poetry in Latin, and has sprouted several child projects and international cooperation. The current version, Perseus 4.0, is also known as the Perseus Hopper, and is mirrored by the University of Chicago.
The Perseus Digital Library was created to provide access to materials of the history of humanity to everyone, with Gregory Crane, the editor-in-chief of the library, stating that "access to the cultural heritage of humanity is a right, not a privilege".
This notably means that the Perseus Digital Library tries not to be exclusive to academics but aims to be accessible to everyone. To reflect this, the library supports open-source content and has published its code on SourceForge. The website is written in Java, uses sustainable formats such as XML and JPEG, and includes native support for the Greek, Latin and Arabic alphabets. It allows users to download all materials that belong to the public domain along with the Creative Commons rights information that specify their conditions of use. While automated downloading is not authorized, in order to protect items subject to intellectual property, the library offers download packages to the public.
The Perseus Digital library also adheres to sets of standards edified by other projects. It follows the norms of the Text Encoding Initiative for its XML mark-up. In the same vein, the library has applied the Canonical Text Services (CTS) protocol regarding citations to its classical Greek-Latin corpus.
Following this philosophy, Perseus chooses to use copyright-free texts, be it in the primary readings or in their translations and commentaries. For these reasons, the texts hosted necessarily date at the latest from the 19th and early 20th century, and must be divided into books, chapters and sections to be displayed individually. As such, those translations and commentaries can be outdated compared to the current state of the research, which can prove problematic when most of the now canonically accepted versions of ancient texts were established and sectioned later, during the 20th century. Perseus however tries to make rare and out-of-print materials accessible, and, for some texts, the material one can find on the website is the only one that was produced, which makes it especially valuable to scholars.
Some content is restricted by intellectual property license agreements with the holders of the rights to that material. This is notably the case for the pictures of artifacts that come from partnership with museums.
The Perseus Library is one of the first digital libraries to have been created, and is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field and a role model of other similar initiatives.
The Perseus Library first originated as a branch of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, from a full-text retrieval tool on Ancient Greek materials made by Gregory Crane, who became the editor-in-chief of the project ever since it was created. The goal of the library was to provide a wider access to knowledge, past the academical field; to quote the mission statement, "to make a full record of humanity, as intellectually accessible as possible, to every human being, regardless of linguistic or cultural background".