ONE of the world's most important collections of Greek manuscripts is going online, part of a growing number of ancient documents to hit the web in recent years.
The British Library said yesterday it was making more than a quarter of its 1000-volume collection of handwritten Greek texts available online free at www.bl.uk/manuscripts, something curators there hope will be a boon to historians, biblical scholars and students of classical Greece.
Although the manuscripts - highlights of which include a famous collection of Aesopic fables discovered on Mount Athos in 1844 - have long been available to scholars who made the trip to the British Library's reading rooms, curator Scot McKendrick said their posting to the web was opening antiquity to the entire world.
''Not every scholar can afford to come here weeks and months on end,'' he said. The big attraction of browsing the texts online ''is the ability to do it at your own desk whenever you wish to do it - and do it for free, as well''.
Although millions of books have been made available online in recent years - notably through Google Books' mass scanning program - ancient texts have taken much longer to emerge from the archives.
They don't suffer from the copyright issues complicating efforts to post contemporary works to the web, but their fragility makes them difficult to handle. They have to be cracked open carefully and photographed one page at a time, a process that costs about £1 ($A1.64) per page.
The library has moved aggressively to put large parts of its collection online.
These range from from 19th-century newspapers to the jewels of its collection: the Lindisfarne gospels, a selection of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches and the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest surviving complete copy of the Bible.
Another batch of about 250 documents is due to be published online in 2012.
New life for ancient texts as archive goes online
Raphael Satter, London
September 28, 2010
ONE of the world's most important collections of Greek manuscripts is going online, part of a growing number of ancient documents to hit the web in recent years.
The British Library said yesterday it was making more than a quarter of its 1000-volume collection of handwritten Greek texts available online free at www.bl.uk/manuscripts, something curators there hope will be a boon to historians, biblical scholars and students of classical Greece.
Although the manuscripts - highlights of which include a famous collection of Aesopic fables discovered on Mount Athos in 1844 - have long been available to scholars who made the trip to the British Library's reading rooms, curator Scot McKendrick said their posting to the web was opening antiquity to the entire world.
''Not every scholar can afford to come here weeks and months on end,'' he said. The big attraction of browsing the texts online ''is the ability to do it at your own desk whenever you wish to do it - and do it for free, as well''.
Although millions of books have been made available online in recent years - notably through Google Books' mass scanning program - ancient texts have taken much longer to emerge from the archives.
They don't suffer from the copyright issues complicating efforts to post contemporary works to the web, but their fragility makes them difficult to handle. They have to be cracked open carefully and photographed one page at a time, a process that costs about £1 ($A1.64) per page.
The library has moved aggressively to put large parts of its collection online.
These range from from 19th-century newspapers to the jewels of its collection: the Lindisfarne gospels, a selection of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches and the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest surviving complete copy of the Bible.
Another batch of about 250 documents is due to be published online in 2012.
AP