The Perseus Digital Library is pleased to announce an initial release of the new Perseus Art & Archaeology Artifact (A&A) Browser (Figure 1) that is based on CollectionBuilder and uses AirTable to manage the extensive metadata found within the A&A collection. 

Figure 1: The new Perseus Art & Archaeology Browser (with randomly selected images on the home page)

An Art and Archaeology Browser has been an integral part of Perseus since the release of Perseus 1.0 in 1992, then described as “a multimedia interactive library” and a legacy instantiation has been available in Perseus 4.0 since 2004.  While work has moved ahead on the Perseus textual collections with the development of the Scaife Viewer starting in 2018, the initial release of Beyond Translation in 2023 and the continuing development of Perseus 6, these efforts have been concentrated on textual data, annotations and related reading tools rather than images of the ancient world and its material objects. 

This update was long overdue. As happens with all software, the current version of the A&A Browser has become outdated, and it can no longer be updated or maintained. The new version addresses several issues:

1. The images have been converted to a common, standard format (TIF) and stored on an institutional server, where they are available to all through the IIIF Image API. Previously, images either could not be viewed at all due to rights restrictions or were only available as thumbnail images.
2. The metadata has been migrated from an ad hoc record format to CIDOC-CRM, an ontology commonly used in cultural heritage institutions to describe their holdings. CRM is highly expressive, allowing us to expand upon the descriptions and relations already represented in the old XML data. Even more important, it is an RDF representation, which means the Perseus A&A metadata will become part of the linked open data network of metadata about cultural heritage materials already being built by cultural heritage institutions world-wide. In addition to this conversion, the metadata can also now be corrected, updated and enhanced. 
3. The new web interface has been built using minimal computing principles.  This paradigm is rapidly being adopted by digital humanities projects and digital libraries (see for example, https://lib-static.github.io/) 

As in the P4 browsing environment, the collection features hundreds of descriptive catalog entries composed by Perseus editors, who also created descriptive keywords. Most entries (see Figure 2) include corresponding images (see Figure 3 ) and/or illustrations (many of these images were collected via custom photography for Perseus). Basic information about the objects has been taken from a number of different standard sources, each of which is cited in the object entries. The new interface also makes use of the IIIF image API to access the images on a IIIF image server (see Figure 4) for individual images. In the short run, this provides users a greatly enhanced experience with the ability to zoom in on details. More significantly, we can integrate images from any collection that makes its data available with a IIIF server. That means that the Perseus viewer could be expanded to include materials from many different collections. 

Figure 2: A sample catalog entry for a vase with a large number of images. Clicking on the image thumbnail launches a new image window as seen in Figure 3

Figure 3:  A new image window opens up with image level metadata and an option to “Click to view Full Screen” at the bottom of the image. Clicking this calls the image from an IIIF server and opens it in a new window as illustrated in Figure 4.

Figure 4: The image in a new viewing window with zooming capability.

An extensive bibliography, available in earlier versions of Perseus, will eventually be published online as part of this new release with links (where available) to bibliographic sources that are either open-access or in the public domain.

In addition to the significant work of the dedicated Perseus editors over the years, all of the descriptions and images in these collections were also produced through collaboration with scholars, researchers, museums and cultural heritage institutions over 25 to 30 years ago. With the release of this new interface we are hoping to again embrace greater collaboration as we look to better integrate the metadata and images into both the Perseus textual collection and beyond.

We call this an initial release because it is only an early version of the system we plan to build. While all the metadata is freely available in our GitHub sites in several formats, including CSV and RDF, our use of CRM is limited. There are also extensive bibliographical references in the metadata that must be resolved into modern digital citation formats, including those that enable them to be linked into the new Perseus Digital Library and potentially other digital collections. And of course the graphical user interface needs extension and refinement (one new feature for example is the ability to browse the collection by subject word cloud in Figure 5). We are making it available now for two reasons: 1) the computing platform on which the current browser runs is failing and must be retired soon; and 2) we want user feedback to guide us as we refine the new version.

Figure 5: A Word Cloud for Subjects.

We welcome your opinions on the new A&A browser. Please email the Perseus webmaster  with your comments and suggestions.