Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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for English translations of Greek mythology, there is the Theoi E-Text collection. 14 Typically these
collections <strong>in</strong>volve digital provision of texts that have been typed <strong>in</strong> manually and the ma<strong>in</strong> form
access is provided by a browsable list of authors and works. Basic services such as keyword search<strong>in</strong>g
are also typically implemented.
One way to dist<strong>in</strong>guish between a digital collection and a digital library is that a library provides a
variety of services <strong>in</strong> addition to an organized collection of objects and texts. Candela et al. (2007)
proposed that the def<strong>in</strong>ition of digital libraries has expanded recently because “generally accepted
conceptions have shifted from a content-centric system that merely supports the organization and
provision of access to particular collections of data and <strong>in</strong>formation, to a person-centric system that
delivers <strong>in</strong>novative, evolv<strong>in</strong>g, and personalized services to users.” Focus<strong>in</strong>g on this concept of
services, this section provides overviews of some multidiscipl<strong>in</strong>ary classical digital libraries that are
large <strong>in</strong> scope and also provide specialized services to their users. They <strong>in</strong>clude the Cuneiform Digital
Library Initiative (CDLI), 15 the PDL, 16 and the TLG. 17 We then look at a number of technologies that
could be used to provide advanced services for classical digital libraries <strong>in</strong> general.
The CDLI is a jo<strong>in</strong>t project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Max Planck Institute
for the History of Science. Accord<strong>in</strong>g to its website, CDLI “represents the efforts of an <strong>in</strong>ternational
group of Assyriologists, museum curators and historians of science to make available through the
<strong>in</strong>ternet the form and content of cuneiform tablets dat<strong>in</strong>g from the beg<strong>in</strong>n<strong>in</strong>g of writ<strong>in</strong>g, ca. 3350 B.C.,
until the end of the pre-Christian era.” While estimat<strong>in</strong>g that there are about 500,000 documents
available <strong>in</strong> private and public collections, the CDLI currently provides onl<strong>in</strong>e access to more than
225,000 that have been cataloged. The CDLI ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>s an extensive website with a full list of <strong>in</strong>cluded
collections, educational resources, a list of related publications, 18 project partners, tools and resources,
and extensive documentation about how data are entered and transliterated and how the onl<strong>in</strong>e catalog
was created. Access to the collection is supported by both a general and an advanced search option.
The basic search <strong>in</strong>terface supports search<strong>in</strong>g transliterations, the catalog, or both simultaneously; the
advanced option also supports search<strong>in</strong>g by publication <strong>in</strong>formation, physical <strong>in</strong>formation, text content
(with language limits), provenience, and chronology. The record for each document <strong>in</strong>cludes extensive
catalog <strong>in</strong>formation, hand-drawn or digital images, and extensive transliterations. 19
The PDL, currently <strong>in</strong> version 4.0, began <strong>in</strong> 1985 and it has evolved from CD-ROM to the current
version of its onl<strong>in</strong>e digital library. While its flagship collection is a classical collection that <strong>in</strong>cludes a
large number of Greek and Lat<strong>in</strong> texts (currently 8,378,421 Greek words and 8,696,429 Lat<strong>in</strong> words),
multiple English translations, and various reference works such as commentaries, histories, and
lexicons, it has other collections <strong>in</strong> Arabic, Old Norse, and English. An art and archaeology browser
also provides access to an extensive collection of images. All the texts <strong>in</strong> the PDL are encoded <strong>in</strong> TEI-
XML, and most can be downloaded, along with the source code or “hopper” that runs the production
digital library. 20 For most Lat<strong>in</strong> and Greek collections, the PDL presents an onl<strong>in</strong>e read<strong>in</strong>g
environment that provides parallel texts (Greek and English, Lat<strong>in</strong> and English) where a user can read
a Greek or Lat<strong>in</strong> text aligned with a public doma<strong>in</strong> English translation. Each text <strong>in</strong> the various
14 For a list of these URLs plus some other selected collections, see http://www.delicious.com/AlisonBabeu/clir-review+digital_collections
15 http://cdli.ucla.edu/
16 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
17 http://www.tlg.uci.edu/
18 These publications <strong>in</strong>clude the CDLJournal, the CDLBullet<strong>in</strong>, and CDLNotes. Many of these scholarly and peer-reviewed publications (all of which are
freely available onl<strong>in</strong>e) represent fairly traditional research that has been made possible through the availability of the onl<strong>in</strong>e collection, but there is also
research that has made use both of the CDLI and computational techniques; see, for example, Jaworski (2008).
19 http://cdli.ucla.edu/search/result.ptid_text=P020005&start=0&result_format=s<strong>in</strong>gle&-op_id_text=eq&size=100
20 http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/opensource/download