Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Perseus Digital Library and the future of libraries

  • Published:
International Journal on Digital Libraries Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper describes the Perseus Digital Library as, in part, a response to limitations of what is now a print culture that is rapidly receding from contemporary consciousness and, at the same time, as an attempt to fashion an infrastructure for the study of the past that can support a shared cultural heritage that extends beyond Europe and is global in scope. But if Greco-Roman culture cannot by itself represent the background of an international twenty-first century culture, this field, at the same time, offers challenges in its scale and complexity that allow us to explore the possibility of digital libraries. Greco-Roman studies is in a position to begin creating a completely transparent intellectual ecosystem, with a critical mass of its primary data available under an open license and with new forms of reading support that make sources in ancient and modern languages accessible to a global audience. In this model, traditional libraries play the role of archives: physically constrained spaces to which a handful of specialists can have access. If non-specialists draw problematic conclusions because the underlying sources are not publicly available and as well-documented as possible, the responsibility lies with the specialists who have not yet created the open, digital libraries upon which the intellectual life of humanity must depend. Greco-Roman Studies can play a major role in modeling such libraries. Perseus seeks to contribute to that transformation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. https://chs.harvard.edu/books/.

  2. https://pleiades.stoa.org/.

References

  1. Gibbon, E.: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, pp. 1776–1789. Strahan and Cadell, London (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Gibbon, E.: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Fred de Fau and Company, New York (1906)

  3. Gibbon, E. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. https://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/index.htm. Accessed 23 Apr 2022

  4. Gibbon, E.: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 12 Vols. | Online Library of Liberty. Online Library of Liberty. https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/lecky-the-history-of-the-decline-and-fall-of-the-roman-empire-12-vols. Accessed 23 Apr 2022

  5. Wolf, F.A.: Prolegomena ad Homerum: sive de operum Homericorum prisca et genuina forma variisque mutationibus et probabili ratione emendandi. Libraria Orphanotrophei (1795)

  6. Bamman, D., Passarotti, M., Busa, R., Crane, G.: The annotation guidelines of the Latin dependency treebank and index thomisticus treebank: the treatment of some specific syntactic constructions in Latin. In: LREC 2008: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (2008)

  7. Bamman, D., Crane, G.: The ancient Greek and Latin dependency treebanks. In: Sporleder, C., van den Bosch, A., Zervanou, K. (eds.) Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing, pp. 79–98 (2011)

  8. Scaife Viewer | Home. https://scaife.perseus.org/. Accessed 23 Apr 2022

  9. Beyond Translation: Iliad (Greek Text of Munro & Allen). https://beyond-translation.perseus.org/reader/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg0012.tlg001.perseus-grc2:1.1-1.7. Accessed 23 Apr 2022

  10. Crane, G., Babeu, A.: The challenge of Virginia Banks: an evaluation of named entity analysis in a 19th-century newspaper collection. In: Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, pp. 31–40 (2006). http://hdl.handle.net/10427/42691

  11. Crane, G., Wulfman, C.: Building a hypertextual digital library in the humanities: a case study on London. In: Proceedings of the First ACM+IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, pp. 426–434. ACM Press (2001)

  12. Crane, G.: Designing Documents to Enhance the Performance of Digital Libraries: Time, Space, People and a Digital Library of London. D-Lib Magazine, vol. 6, no. 7/8 (2000)

  13. Crane, Gregory: Greco-Roman studies in a digital age. Daedalus 145(2), 127–33 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00383

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Crane, G.: Greco-Roman studies and the future of Europe. Class. Contin. 102, 53–68 (2022)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Crane, G.: Thoughts on classical studies in the 21st century United States. Class. Inq. (2021). https://classical-inquiries.chs.harvard.edu/thoughts-on-classical-studies-in-the-21st-century-united-states/

  16. Crane, G., et al.: Toward a cultural heritage digital library. In: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, pp. 75–86 (2003)

  17. Crosby, H.L., Schaeffer, J.N.: An Introduction to Greek. Allyn and Bacon, Boston (1928)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Liddell, H.G., Scott, R.: An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon: Founded upon the Seventh Edition of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1882)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Burnet, J.: Plato Euthyphro; Apology of Socrates; and Crito. Clarendon Press, Oxford (1924)

    Book  Google Scholar 

  20. von Soden, W., Meissner, B.: Akkadisches Handwörterbuch: unter Benutzung des lexikalischen Nachlasses von Bruno Meissner (1868–1947). O. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden (1965)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Kernighan, B.W., Ritichie, D.M.: The C Programming Language. Prentice Hall, Hoboken (1978)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Lesk, M.: Some Applications of Inverted Indexes on the Unix System. UNIX Programmer’s Manual: Supplementary Documents, vol. 2, 7th edn. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York (1982)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Refer (Software). Wikipedia, 28 Mar 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Refer_(software)

  24. Muellner, L.: The free first thousand years of Greek. In: Berti, M. (ed.) Digital Classical Philology, pp. 7–18. De Gruyter Saur, Berlin (2019). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110599572-002

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  25. Open Greek and Latin: An International Collaboration Committed to Creating an Open Educational Resource for Ancient Greek and Latin. https://opengreekandlatin.org/. Accessed 1 June 2022

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA

    Gregory Crane

Authors
  1. Gregory Crane
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gregory Crane.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

The work presented here builds primarily upon funding from the Mellon Foundation (“A Framework for Annotation Interoperability”: 1802-05569) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (“Beyond Translation”: HAA-266462-19, as well as upon a fall 2020 sabbatical from Tufts and fellowship for Crane at Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies).

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Springer Nature or its licensor holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Crane, G. The Perseus Digital Library and the future of libraries. Int J Digit Libr 24, 117–128 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-022-00333-2

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-022-00333-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation