Evolution & Growth of the Catalog

The current Perseus Catalog of Greek and Latin was first conceived of in 2005 as a “FRBRized” catalog for the Perseus Digital Library’s online collection of Greek and Latin texts (Mimno et al. 2005). This eventually grew into what became known as the “FRBR-Inspired catalog” (Babeu 2008) for a growing collection of digitized Greek and Latin books (both being produced in-house at Perseus and in the Open Content Alliance).

This collection made use of the MODS and MADS standards developed by the U.S. Library of Congress and by 2012 was intended to provide cataloged access to at least one version of every surviving major Greek and Latin author from antiquity (Babeu 2012). The catalog is currently being re-conceptualized as the basis for the Open Greek and Latin Project and is also part of both the Billion Word Library and the Reinvention of Humanities Publication, projects both supported by the European Social Fund and hosted at the University of Leipzig. Open Greek and Latin is but one component of the recently-announced Open Philology Project launched by the Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities at Leipzig.

A major part of this new effort is made possible by work done at the Center for Hellenic Studies to support the Homer Multitext Project. The utilization of the Canonical Text Services (CTS) protocol (Smith 2009) and the related CITE Architecture (Smith and Weaver 2009)  both increase the interoperability of the catalog data with other digital classics projects and take advantage of these standards support for unique identification of both texts and retrieval of text fragments through standard network services.