The Hellespont Project: Integrating Arachne and Perseus

• Subject Area: Classical, Roman, Christian and Islamic Archaeology
• Term: from 2010 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 171982858

The German Archaeological Institute and Tufts University propose to combine and expand the collections of two of the oldest and most established digital projects in Classical Studies – Arachne and Perseus – and thus create a single comprehensive digital library about the ancient world. The resulting collection will contain CIDOC-CRM metadata for more than 250,000 archaeological sites and objects, MODS/FRBR bibliographic records for editions of every major Greek and Latin author whose work survives either in the manuscript tradition or in substantial fragments, and TEI P5 compliant XML transcriptions for 20 million words of Greek and Latin primary sources, as well as for more than 50 million words of archaeological documentation, major lexica, commentaries, and encyclopedias.The Arachne/Perseus collaboration bridges three gaps: First, it provides a single, extensible environment for the material and textual record. Second, it addresses the problem of multilingual scholarship. Third, by releasing the shared collections of CIDOC-CRM, TEI-P5 XML, FRBR/MODS and other standards/best practices under a Creative Commons license, this collaboration goes beyond the challenge of making Arachne and Perseus interoperable.

• DFG Programme: Cataloguing and Digitisation (Scientific Library Services and Information Systems)
• International Connection: USA
• Applicant Institution: Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI)
• Partner Organisation: National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Gregory R. Crane, Ph.D.; Professor Dr. Reinhard Förtsch