Editing Perseus Digital Library (section)

== Purpose ==
The Perseus Digital Library was created to provide access to materials of the history of humanity to everyone, with Gregory Crane, the editor-in-chief of the library, stating that "access to the cultural heritage of humanity is a right, not a privilege".{{R|Lang}}

=== Open Source ===
This notably means that the Perseus Digital Library tries not to be exclusive to academics but aims to be accessible to everyone.{{R|Lang}}{{R|Minds Alive}} To reflect this, the library supports [[open-source content]] and has published its code on [[SourceForge]]. The website is written in [[JavaScript|Java]], uses sustainable formats such as [[XML]] and [[JPEG]],{{R|Preece-Zepeda}} and includes native support for the [[Greek alphabet|Greek]], [[Latin alphabet|Latin]] and [[Arabic alphabet|Arabic]] alphabets. It allows users to download all materials that belong to the public domain along with the [[Creative Commons]] rights information that specify their conditions of use. While automated downloading is not authorized, in order to protect items subject to intellectual property, the library offers download packages to the public.{{R|Lang}}

The Perseus Digital library also adheres to sets of standards edified by other projects. It follows the norms of the [[Text Encoding Initiative]] for its XML mark-up. In the same vein, the library has applied the Canonical Text Services (CTS) protocol regarding citations to its classical Greek-Latin corpus.{{R|Lang}}{{R|Preece-Zepeda}}

Following this philosophy, Perseus chooses to use [[copyright]]-free texts, be it in the primary readings or in their translations and commentaries. For these reasons, the texts hosted necessarily date at the latest from the 19th and early 20th century, and must be divided into books, chapters and sections to be displayed individually. As such, those translations and [[Commentary (philology)|commentaries]] can be outdated compared to the current state of the research, which can prove problematic when most of the now canonically accepted versions of ancient texts were established and sectioned later, during the 20th century.{{R|Lang}}
Perseus however tries to make rare and out-of-print materials accessible,{{R|Wulfman}} and, for some texts, the material one can find on the website is the only one that was produced, which makes it especially valuable to scholars.{{R|Lang}}

Some content is restricted by [[intellectual property]] [[license#Intellectual property|license]] agreements with the holders of the rights to that material. This is notably the case for the pictures of artifacts that come from partnership with museums.{{R|Lang}}