According to the Academy's website, "The overarching goal of the HDP is to present the history and development of the Hebrew lexicon, from the earliest occurrences of words down through their most recent documentation.
[2] The editorial board consists of Prof. Chaim E. Cohen, editor-in-chief;[3] Prof. Steven (Shmuel) Fassberg, associate editor;[4] and Dr. Gabriel Birnbaum, writer of the entries.
As much scholarly attention had already been given to the Hebrew Bible and the Pseudepigrapha, it was decided to begin with texts from the post-biblical period.
Such a project requires a large textual database, and the HDP was one of the first in the world to develop and use a computerized concordance.
In 1959 it was decided that there would be one central dictionary containing all periods, i.e., ancient, medieval and modern Hebrew literature.
In addition to enabling grammatical analyses and concordance searches, the archives also contain unique corpora, such as Hebrew poetry from the 11th century.
Essentially a concordance, the online resource accesses all the words in the database and enables retrieval of citations according to roots, lemmata, and declined forms or combinations, as well as of specific texts by title, author, date, or literary genre.