Perseus Collaborators

Perseus has collaborated with many institutions and individuals since serious development began in 1987. Our goals have, however, remained consistent. We are dedicated to making the best possible materials available to the widest possible audience. While we seek to enhance student learning and faculty research, we have found that electronic publication allows us to go beyond the reach of conventional academic publication.

Our current collaborations range from consulting, research, and development on well-defined projects to more general exchanges of ideas. We serve as non-exclusive publishers for content that others have prepared. We help projects develop their own materials. We develop new collections for third parties. We provide digital library software and infrastructure for other collections. While we support open access and have wherever possible made content available for free, we also recognize the need to generate revenues and the role of private investment in creating first class information resources for society as a whole.

Current collaborations include:

• Working with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, we have been developing the Archimedes Project, a digital library of sources for the history of mechanics. A recent grant from NSF will make it possible to enhance the working environment in Berlin and to lay the foundation for general tools.
• Perseus has worked closely with the Tufts University Archives. We have begun a joint effort to create a digital library on the history and topography of London and its Environs, based on a special collection about London created by Edwin C. Bolles. More than 10,000,000 words, 10,000 pictures, and dozens of maps from this collection have been digitized and integrated into a tightly hyperlinked digital library. Our preliminary efforts, supported by the Berger Family Fund for Technology Transfer and by Tufts University generally, led to a National Leadership Award from the IMLS In addition, the Perseus Digital Library has provided a framework for a growing History of Tufts University, being prepared for the university's 150th anniversary in 2002.
• The Stoa Consortium, based at the University of Kentucky, is a venue for electronic publication of classical scholarship. The Stoa aims to promote standards for text encoding among scholars. We have made our XML document manager available to the Stoa, and the Stoa in turn allows Perseus to publish editions of its texts.
• The Modern Language Association publishes the New Variorum Shakespeare Series, one of the most authoritative and oldest series in all of scholarship. We are collaborating with the editorial board of the NVS as it attempts to create an electronic version of this resource. The result of this collaboration will be XML files, guidelines for encoding (based on the Text Encoding Initiative) and electronic versions of New Variorum Editions which the MLA can distribute.
• The Perseus Digital Library provides access to selected content that other projects have created. Perseus includes third party materials to test the applicability of its tools to a broader range of materials and/or to provide access to particular serivces within the Perseus Digital Library. The Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri was created before SGML or XML had achieved wide recognition. We helped convert the DDBDP into SGML and have applied to these texts the suite of Greek analysis and searching tools that we had developed for the Perseus Classics collections. A fully searchable version of the DDBDP is available in Perseus. The Library of Congress has made American Memory collections available to projects in the Digital Libraries Initiative. American Memory collections on California and the Upper Midwest were already tagged in SGML and were quickly integrated into the Perseus framework. We are experimenting with automatically generated maps and timelines as a means to visualize the contents of these collections.
• The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has received a major grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to provide integrated, online acces to its archives documenting its Egyptian excavations at the Pyramids of Giza. We will be working with the MFA to help them develop new ways of linking plans, database records, 2D images, 3D reconstructions and other categories of evidence into a coherent whole.
• The Beazley Archive at the University of Oxford have compiled a database of over 67,000 Greek vases and over 27,000 photographs. Perseus is collaborating with the Beazley Archive to integrate searching of their database into the Perseus digital library and cross-linking of Perseus' images to the Beazley's database.

  In addition, Perseus is a member of the Open Language Archives Community, a network of language archives using the Open Archives Initiative protocol to share meta-data and software tools.

As a matter of policy, Perseus only seeks non-exclusive rights to all materials.