Information about Perseus

What is the Perseus Project?
The Perseus Project is an evolving digital library of resources for the study of the humanities. Collaborators initially formed the project to construct a large, heterogeneous collection of materials, textual and visual, on the Archaic and Classical Greek world. Planning for Perseus began in 1985; the project was formally established in July, 1987. Since then, the Perseus Project has published two CD-ROMs and created the on-line Perseus Digital Library. The project has expanded into other areas of the humanities adding tools for more languages, a variety of collections, and new types of materials. The classical foundation has paved the way for literary and historical collections ranging from the English Renaissance to the American Civil War, and Greek tools became a foundation for the development of resources in Latin, Italian, and Arabic. The project continues to explore new ways of presenting complex resources for electronic publication. Collaboration with the Digital Collections and Archives of Tufts University led to the Bolles Collection on London. Other collections in development include the American Civil War. For more on our current work, see our collaborations page.
Perseus has received awards and recognition as one of the major humanities sites on the World Wide Web.

Goals and Mission
Our goal is to bring a wide range of source materials to as large an audience as possible. We anticipate that greater accessibility to the sources for the study of the humanities will strengthen the quality of questions, lead to new avenues of research, and connect more people through the connection of ideas. Members of the project have collected a large set of core data. Additionally, a good deal of the work done at the project focuses on how best to structure the framework for the massive set of texts, images, plans, and maps which comprise the library. In addition to gathering more materials, we continue to build and supplement our powerful set of searching and indexing tools. These tools are at the heart of our work: they form the connections between the various kinds of materials within Perseus and facilitate the exploration of these materials for general readers and specialists alike.

Publications
CDs: The project produced Perseus 1.0: Interactive Sources and Studies on Ancient Greek Culture in 1992. Yale University Press published Perseus 1.0 on one CD-ROM for the Macintosh with an accompanying videodisc. Yale University Press released Perseus 2.0 in 1996 and Platform Independent Perseus 2.0 in 2000. Nearly four times the size of Perseus 1.0, Perseus 2.0 for the Macintosh features additional art and archaeology materials and more texts. Please refer to a chart outlining the differences between the Perseus CD-ROMs and the Perseus Digital Library if you have questions on the content of the CDs vs. the materials you see on-line here.

WWW: Since 1995, the Perseus Project WWW site has grown into the Perseus Digital Library, an on-line publication of the materials contained on the Perseus CDs as well as new areas of research. Recent expansions include ancient science, Roman materials, Greek lexicography, an on-line edition of the works of Christopher Marlowe, sources for Shakespeare's Richard III and Julius Caesar, a facsimile First Folio, a collaborative project with the Modern Language Association to study creation of new electronic Variorum editions, work on the Bolles collection on the City of London, and the evaluation of new electronic tools for the study of ancient culture.

Please visit our publications page for further information on our research.

Staff
The Editor-in-Chief of the project is Professor Gregory Crane. Perseus currently employs six full-time staff members and numerous graduate and undergraduate research assistants. Teamwork and collaboration are at the heart of the project, and staff members regularly consult with advisors from colleges and universities across the country. Additional information on current and past Perseus staff is on-line here.

Support
Perseus is a non-profit enterprise, located in the Department of the Classics, Tufts University.

The Perseus Project is funded by the Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 2, the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, private donations and Tufts University.
Support for the project has been provided by the Annenberg/CPB Project, Apple Computer, the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment, the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education, the Getty Grant program, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Modern Language Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Packard Humanities Institute, Xerox Corporation, Boston University, and Harvard University.

Citing this Web site in a bibliography:

If you wish to cite the Perseus Web site in a bibliography, please list it with the URL, and the month and year you accessed it, as in the following example:

Crane, Gregory R. (ed.) The Perseus Project, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu, September, 2000.