The Perseus Project is a digital library project of Tufts University that assembles digital collections of humanities resources. It is hosted by the Department of Classics. It has suffered at times from computer hardware problems, and its resources are occasionally unavailable. The project is mirrored by the Max Planck Society in Berlin^[1] and the University of Chicago.^[2]

The project was founded in 1987 to collect and present materials for study of ancient Greece. It has published two CD-ROMs and established the Perseus Digital Library on the World Wide Web in 1995. The project has expanded its original scope; current collections cover Greco-Roman classics, the English Renaissance. Other materials, such as the papers of Edwin Bolles and the history of Tufts University, have moved into the Tufts Digital Library.

The editor-in-chief of the project is Gregory Crane, the Tufts Winnick Family Chair in Technology and Entrepreneurship. He has been editor-in-chief since the founding of the Perseus Project.

Ancient Greek works in Perseus are stored as beta code, though they can be reformatted for display into a variety of transcription systems.^[3]

Copyright status[link]

The Perseus Project supports open-source content^[4] and has published code on SourceForge.^[5] Perseus is a contributor to the Open Content Alliance^[6] and supports the Internet Archive.

All texts and materials believed to be in the public domain are available for free download in XML format from Perseus 4.0.^[7] Some content is restricted by intellectual property license agreements with the rights holders.

Although the texts are accessible free of charge, their quality varies and they often contain numerous typos, due to a lack of proofreading, which makes them unfit for formal use. Better quality texts in Latin are accessible for free from the Packard Humanities Institute.

See also[link]

• List of digital library projects
• Stoa Consortium
• Digital Classicist
• Thesaurus Linguae Graecae
• Herculaneum papyri

References[link]

Literature[link]

• Ancient Greece from Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times by Thomas R. Martin, Yale University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-300-06956-1. A text written by Prof Martin to accompany the Perseus Project online resources.

External links[link]

• The Perseus Project
• The Perseus Project (alternative interface)