Perseus Project

• Host: Tufts University, Classics Department
• URL: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu

Description:

Perseus is an evolving digital library which currently focuses upon the ancient Greek world. Planning for Perseus began in 1985. The first edition, for Macintosh, was published on CD-ROM in 1992, through Yale University Press. The second edition (2000) operates on PC and Macintosh platforms.

Perseus contains transcriptions and translations of many Greek, a growing number of Latin sources, and Renaissance works in English. A range of text analysis tools are built into Perseus, primarily for working with the Greek texts. Perseus also contains a large body of art and archaeology resources, and background information on the ancient world. In total, it has a catalogue of 25,000 images of architecture, sculpture, coins, vases, and sites, and an extensive collection of atlases, maps, and plans.

Perseus has received funding through the Digital Libraries Initiative (phase 2) to become the Digital Library for the Humanities. The new project will expand its collections to cover a wider range of subjects, explore and develop tools to support complex searching and information retrieval, and to evaluate the impact of digital libraries on learning. Greg Crane has an article on Perseus and the new digital library in a recent edition of D-Lib Magazine (number 6, 7/8) Designing documents to enhance the performance of digital libraries: Time, space, people, and a digital library on London.

Funders:

The is supported by the Digital Libraries Initiative phase 2, the Annenberg/CPB Project, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Grant program, Tufts University, the Modern Language Assosication, the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment, and the Fun for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education. It has received funding in the past from Apple Computer, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Packard Humanities Institute, Xerox Corporation, Boston University, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Harvard University. Perseus is a non-profit enterprise, headquartered at the Classics Department, Tufts University.

– Perseus WWW Home Page

Contact:

Gregory Crane,

Editor-in-Chief

Associate Professor of Classics

Tufts Univerity

Email: gcrane@perseus.tufts.edu