[1] Arachne is intended to provide archaeologists and Classicists with a free internet research tool for searching hundreds of thousands of records on objects and their attributes.

Thanks to the significant and continuous support by the German Research Foundation (DFG) since 2001 Arachne integrates also negative archives, which have significantly expanded the data stock of Arachne, hence the archives of the photographers Barbara Malter and Gisela Badura-Fittschen were digitized and documented.

Another major step in the development of Arachne was the provision of engravings (“Stichwerke”) without existing copyrights by the DFG-funded project (2009-2013) "Reception of Antiquity in a Semantic Network: Digital Books, Images and Objects”.

2,300 engraving works have been initially provided in the TEI viewer - specially developed within the project - with OCR full text search.

The total amount is shown in the iDAI.bookbrowser which enables a direct link between the represented objects of the 'real world' and their textual descriptions in the digital books.

The iDAI.bookbrowser supported by its OAI interfaces the METS metadata standard and is linked to external online portals (Propylaeum, ZVDD).