Editing Perseus Digital Library (section)

==History==
The Perseus Library is one of the first digital libraries to have been created, and is widely regarded as a pioneer in the field and a role model of other similar initiatives.{{R|Wulfman}}{{R|Coffee-Bernstein}}{{R|Svensson}}{{R|"Digital Humanities Companion"}}{{R|Xie-Matusiak}}

The Perseus Library first originated as a branch of the [[Thesaurus Linguae Graecae]], from a full-text retrieval tool on [[ancient Greece|Ancient Greek]] materials made by Gregory Crane, who became the editor-in-chief of the project ever since it was created.{{R|"Minds Alive"}} The goal of the library was to provide a wider access to knowledge, past the academical field; to quote the mission statement, "to make a full record of humanity, as intellectually accessible as possible, to every human being, regardless of linguistic or cultural background".{{R|"Official Website"}}

The planning period took place from 1985 to 1988, with the development of the Ancient Greek collection starting in 1987 thanks to funding from the [[Annenberg Foundation|Annenberg-CPB Project]] which allowed the Perseus Project to be developed.{{R|Preece-Zepeda}}

Perseus 1.0, or HyperCard Perseus, was a [[CD-ROM]] released in 1992 by [[Yale University]], using the Apple [[HyperCard]] for [[Macintosh|Macintosh]].{{R|"Minds Alive"}}{{R|Preece-Zepeda}}{{R|"Digital Humanities Companion"}} For practical reasons, it was limited to ancient Greek materials, and contained the texts of nine major Greek authors along with an English translation and commentary.{{R|"Minds Alive"}} The collection was enriched by use of [[hyperlink]] technology and contextual material such as pictures of artifacts, an atlas as well as an historical timeline, and an encyclopedia of places, people and terminology, in an attempt to help non-academic users gain access to the material.{{R|"Minds Alive"}}{{R|Preece-Zepeda}} Perseus 1.0 got nonetheless criticized for its "difficulty of use and odd content, both specialised and lacking".{{R|"Bryn Mawr"}}  Furthermore, it was not a true digital library, but rather more a CD-ROM of primary readings published with various additional information.{{R|Preece-Zepeda}}

A second version of the CD-ROM came in 1996 in the form of Perseus 2.0, which mainly expanded the collection of pictures. It was still limited to McIntosh computers, until a platform-independent version got released in 2000.{{R|"Minds Alive"}}{{R|Preece-Zepeda}}

Hardware limitations induced costs and limited the scope of the projects, which ultimately led to the CD-ROM versions of Perseus only covering Greek material. Moreover, they were very expensive: even though the price was to only make minimal profits, the CDs cost between $150 and $350 depending on the amount of material included, and were only released in North America, which severely limited worldwide accessibility.{{R|"Minds Alive"}}

After moving to Tufts University in 1993,{{R|Preece-Zepeda}} the Perseus Library switched to a website version in 1995 written in [[Perl]].{{R|"Minds Alive"}}{{R|Preece-Zepeda}}{{R|Xie-Matusiak}} Thanks to this new interface, Perseus-Online could reach a wider audience. However, Perseus was still bound by copyright agreements made with the CD-ROM company, which limited the reuse of material.{{R|"Minds Alive"}}

Perseus 2.0 Online expanded the collection in 1997, adding [[Ancient Rome|Roman]] materials as well as [[Renaissance]] texts of [[Shakespeare]] and [[Christopher Marlowe|Marlowe]]. This version also introduced a search bar on the website, as well as articles which presented information on Heracles and the Olympic Games, which were quite successful.{{R|"Minds Alive"}} In 1999, a grant from the Digital Library Initiative Phase 2 allowed Perseus to expand into other areas of Humanities and to create collections on the [[History of London]] and the [[American Civil War]].{{R|Preece-Zepeda}}{{R|Xie-Matusiak}}

Perseus 3.0 released in 2000 directly on the web.{{R|Preece-Zepeda}} This version expanded and revised the website, adding new collections, but it was subject to some issues when it came to making links to material stable and consistent.{{R|"Minds Alive"}}

The current version of Perseus, Perseus 4.0, also known as the Perseus Hopper, was released in 2005, with Perseus 3.0 coexisting alongside and slowly fading out, until it got taken down in 2009.{{R|"Minds Alive"}}{{R|Preece-Zepeda}} This time, the website was based on [[Java (programming language)|Java]], written in the open-sourced language Hopper and TEI-compliant XML. The shift allowed Perseus to produce its own XML-encoded texts, which were not bound by copyright agreements. The Greek, Latin and English collections were released in 2006 under a Creative Commons License.{{R|"Minds Alive"}} The source code got subsequently released in 2007.{{R|"Minds Alive"}}

Perseus has nowadays branched into other projects: the Scaife Viewer, which is the first phase of the work towards Perseus 5.0,{{R|"Scaife Youtube"}} the Perseus Catalog,{{R|Lang}}{{R|Babeu}}{{R|"Perseus Youtube"}} which provides links to the digital editions not hosted by the Perseus Library, the Perseids Project,{{R|Lang}} which aims to support access to Classics scholarship by providing tools to foster language acquisition, facilitate working with documents, and encourage research, and, more recently, the Beyond Translation project, which aims to combine the Scaife Viewer with new versions and services of Perseus 4.0.{{R|"Official Website"}}

Furthermore, the library has been cooperating internationally with [[Leipzig University]], with several projects emerging of it, such as the Ancient Greek and Latin Dependency Treebank, for classical philology, Leipzig Open Fragmentary Texts Series (LOFTS) which focuses on fragmentary texts,{{R|LOFTS}} the Open Greek and Latin Project and Open Persian.{{R|Lang}}