Editing Perseus Digital Library (section)

== Content ==
=== Collections ===
The Perseus Digital Library contains online collections on the Humanities pertaining to different subjects. 
The main collection focuses on the classical materials of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and features an extensive number of texts written in Ancient Greek and Latin chosen for their status as a canonical literary text, in a degree of completeness and representativeness no other digital library can claim.{{R|Lang}} It has however been noted that the materials that weren't included on account on not being traditionally studied are further devalued by the lack of representation.{{R|Lang}}

The library does not only host primary readings. Partnerships with museums allowed it to build a consequent collection of artifacts which showcases pictures of coins, sculptures, vases, but also gems, buildings and sites, as well as information concerning the context of artifact and its current location.{{R|"Official Website"}}{{R|"Perseus Youtube"}}
Moreover, Perseus includes commentaries and translations that are free of copyright. However, to be free of copyright, texts have to be sufficiently old, and, as a result, Classics scholars have insisted that the commentaries and translations provided by Perseus cannot be used in an academical setting due to their age and the existence of more recent editions for the most often researched texts.{{R|Lang}}

Although the classical section is the most complete and established of the website, the Perseus Digital Library is not limited to this collection, and has branched throughout its existence into other categories of knowledge.
Materials on early modern English literature are as such available, and used to be called the Perseus Garner.{{R|Wulfman}} They consisted of a heterogeneous compilation of primary materials from the early modern period in England, as well as selected secondary materials from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, comprising the works of [[Christopher Marlowe]], the Globe Shakespeare, volumes from the New Variorum Shakespeare Series, [[Raphael Holinshed|Raphael Holinshed's]] Chronicles, [[Richard Hakluyt|Richard Hakluyt's]] Voyages and the rhetorical works of [[Henry Peacham (born 1546)|Henry Peacham]] and [[Thomas Wilson (rhetorician)|Thomas Wilson]], among other primary sources. Several reference works, include glossaries and lexicons, are also included.{{R|Wulfman}} This collection of texts has however been criticized for its choices of inclusion, and described as neither balanced nor complete, and texts not included are devalued by their absence.{{R|Lang}}

Records from [[American Memory]], a corpus of electronic versions of the [[Library of Congress]] archival collections related to the cultural heritage of the United States, were harvested in order to offer a collection on the history of the 19th-century United States.{{R|Preece-Zepeda}} This third-party collection was further completed by materials on the [[American Civil War]]. This sub-collection, as well as materials on the Humanist and Renaissance Italian Poetry in Latin and the [[Richmond Times Dispatch]], are regarded as fairly complete due to their narrow subject.

Perseus also hosts a variety of documents on the study of [[Germanic people]], such as [[Beowulf]] and a variety of sagas in [[Old Norse]] along with translations.{{R|"Official Website"}} This sub-section has been described as fairly good, considering that this field of research is less well researched than the other.{{R|Lang}}

Finally, the Perseus Digital Library hosts [[Arabic]] materials, but its selection is limited to the [[Quran]] and dictionaries.{{R|Lang}}{{R|"Official Website"}}

The Library used to host the Bolles Collection of the [[History of London]], a digitized recreation of an existing special collection homogeneous in theme but heterogeneous in content, which interlinks maps of London, relevant texts, and historical and contemporary illustrations of the city.{{R|"Digital Humanities Companion"}} The collection got transferred to the [[Tufts Digital Library]]. The same can be said of the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri and the history of Tufts, which used to be on the website as well (Perseus). A section on the history of mechanics also used to be present on Perseus.{{R|Preece-Zepeda}}

=== Use of technology ===
The Perseus Library follows the goal of [[Digital Humanities]], which is to capitalize on the use of modern technology to further research in Classics and facilitate understanding of the material. As such, it uses a variety of tools to enrich the texts it hosts.

One of the way it does so is by automatically linking the texts to additional materials. Interlinks exist between a primary reading, its different versions, and its translations and commentaries. Users can also find maps of places mentioned in the texts as well as a historical timeline, and search tools allow readers to look for a text by its author or the presence of a specific [[lemma (morphology)|lemma]] or word.{{R|Lang}}{{R|Preece-Zepeda}}{{R|"Rydberg-Cox Libraries"}}{{R|Mahoney}}
Perseus also enhanced its texts through TEI-compliant<ref>{{Cite web |title=TEI: Text Encoding Initiative |url=https://tei-c.org/ |access-date=2023-06-19 |website=tei-c.org}}</ref> [[markup language]], which allows each word to be linked to a dictionary entry, a [[Morphology (linguistics)|morphological]] analysis tool known as Morpheus, a [[Word list|word frequency]] tool, and other texts where the word is used.{{R|Lang}}{{R|Wulfman}}{{R|"Rydberg-Cox Libraries"}}
Since the mark-up is automatically generated, older sections of the libraries have been noted to be less rich and complete than newer ones.{{R|Lang}} This structure allows for a machine-readable and searchable environment, and one of Perseus' goals is the automated generation of knowledge through [[text mining|text and data mining]].{{R|Preece-Zepeda}}

Each section of a text and item is also given a stable identifier of 10 digits,{{R|Preece-Zepeda}} which makes citations possible{{R|"Perseus Youtube"}} in the form of four different [[Uniform Resource Identifier|URIs]] (text, citation, work, catalog record) containing [[Uniform Resource Name|URNs]];{{R|Lang}} furthermore, metadata schemes are employed as to make each section or object meaningful outside of the context of the library.{{R|Preece-Zepeda}} Those sections are also given a Creative Commons license indicating conditions of use.{{R|Lang}}
However, one should note the lack of a TEI-header containing bibliographical information and metadata about the respective source, and that such information needs to be searched for on the Perseus Catalog.{{R|Lang}}
 
As a result of the use of this technology, Perseus has been useful to scholars of [[Classics#Philology|classical philology]] and [[Classics#Ancient History|history]] in facilitating the study of the material,{{R|Lang}}{{R|"Rydberg-Cox Acquisition"}} but also to students who have benefited from the various tools the library offers.{{R|Preece-Zepeda}}{{R|Mahoney}}

=== Criticism on the website ===
The website has been criticised for being ergonomically poor and unintuitive, and new users may have problems accessing resources due to a confusing layout which seems to prioritize showcasing the Perseus Digital Library over its collections.{{R|Lang}}{{R|Preece-Zepeda}} The lack of presentation for collections accentuates this problem.{{R|Preece-Zepeda}} Accessibility is another issue, with pages not always adhering to the standards of the [[Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973]].{{R|Preece-Zepeda}}

=== Sustainability ===
Perseus has proven convincing in terms of sustainability throughout its long history{{R|Lang}} and ability to evolve, having notably been able to migrate from the [[SGML]] format to XML in Perseus 4.0.{{R|Preece-Zepeda}} The preservation of the collections is further insured by a [[Fedora Commons]] Backend created in 2002{{R|"Minds Alive"}}{{R|Preece-Zepeda}} as well as a [[mirror site]] provided by the University of Chicago.{{R|Lang}}
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