New Collections, New Navigation

17 November 2000

The Perseus Project, in collaboration with the Tufts University Archives, is pleased to announce the release of the Edwin C. Bolles collection on the History and Topography of London. Bolles, the first chaplain of Tufts College and a professor of English and history, collected materials on Victorian London, including about 400 books, over 300 maps, and thousands of prints and other illustrations. To read more about the Bolles Collection, see the collection overview.

The Bolles Collection demonstrates the power of the Perseus digital library architecture. The original focus of the Perseus project, starting back in 1987, was on classical Greek art, history, and literature, and expansion to Latin and Roman materials seemed quite natural. The same document management system, image database, and geographic tool set, however, can work just as well for other historical and literary fields.

Other collections available within the Perseus Digital Library include

• English Renaissance literature, focusing on Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare

• California as I Saw It and Pioneering the Upper Midwest, two groups of books from the American Memory Project at the Library of Congress

In addition, we are making available pre-prints of the scholarly work done by the Perseus team. Articles in this collection explain the details of the Perseus SGML/XML document manager.

Collection overviews like the ones cited above are one of several new features also being introduced. Each collection now has its own distinctive appearance, logo, and color scheme. Page layouts have been re-designed to make it easier to explore the Perseus collections and to find the texts, pictures, and maps you are looking for. And a new front page gives an overview of the entire content of the Digital Library.

Inside, though, the familiar Perseus tools still work, on the Classics collection and all the others as well. The collections are integrated, so you can move easily from Marlowe's Latin verse (in the Renaissance collection) to the Latin Word Study Tool (in the Classics collection) or to a summary of Marlowe's life (in the Bolles London collection). Implicit searches, using the Lookup Tool, will offer you relevant material from all collections.

Please report any problems to the Perseus webmaster.