While originally focused on the ancient Greco-Roman world, it has since diversified and offers materials in Arabic, Germanic, English Renaissance literature, 19th century American documents and Italian poetry in Latin, and has sprouted several child projects and international cooperation.
The website is written in Java, uses sustainable formats such as XML and JPEG,[3] and includes native support for the Greek, Latin and Arabic alphabets.
In the same vein, the library has applied the Canonical Text Services (CTS) protocol regarding citations to its classical Greek-Latin corpus.
For these reasons, the texts hosted necessarily date at the latest from the 19th and early 20th century, and must be divided into books, chapters and sections to be displayed individually.
As such, those translations and commentaries can be outdated compared to the current state of the research, which can prove problematic when most of the now canonically accepted versions of ancient texts were established and sectioned later, during the 20th century.
[4][5][6][7][8] The Perseus Library first originated as a branch of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, from a full-text retrieval tool on Ancient Greek materials made by Gregory Crane, who became the editor-in-chief of the project ever since it was created.
Moreover, they were very expensive: even though the price was to only make minimal profits, the CDs cost between $150 and $350 depending on the amount of material included, and were only released in North America, which severely limited worldwide accessibility.
[2] In 1999, a grant from the Digital Library Initiative Phase 2 allowed Perseus to expand into other areas of Humanities and to create collections on the History of London and the American Civil War.
[3] This version expanded and revised the website, adding new collections, but it was subject to some issues when it came to making links to material stable and consistent.
[1] Although the classical section is the most complete and established of the website, the Perseus Digital Library is not limited to this collection, and has branched throughout its existence into other categories of knowledge.
[4] They consisted of a heterogeneous compilation of primary materials from the early modern period in England, as well as selected secondary materials from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, comprising the works of Christopher Marlowe, the Globe Shakespeare, volumes from the New Variorum Shakespeare Series, Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, Richard Hakluyt's Voyages and the rhetorical works of Henry Peacham and Thomas Wilson, among other primary sources.
This sub-collection, as well as materials on the Humanist and Renaissance Italian Poetry in Latin and the Richmond Times Dispatch, are regarded as fairly complete due to their narrow subject.
[3] The Perseus Library follows the goal of Digital Humanities, which is to capitalize on the use of modern technology to further research in Classics and facilitate understanding of the material.
[1] This structure allows for a machine-readable and searchable environment, and one of Perseus' goals is the automated generation of knowledge through text and data mining.
[1] As a result of the use of this technology, Perseus has been useful to scholars of classical philology and history in facilitating the study of the material,[1][18] but also to students who have benefited from the various tools the library offers.
[3][16] The website has been criticised for being ergonomically poor and unintuitive, and new users may have problems accessing resources due to a confusing layout which seems to prioritize showcasing the Perseus Digital Library over its collections.
Frederik Baumgardt and Tim Buckingham are also noted as working on the Perseids Project full time, respectively as Data Architect and Senior Research Coordinator.
According to the home page of the Perseus website, the list of recent financial supporters includes: the Alpheios Project, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the United States Department of Education, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Endowment for the Humanities as well as private donors, and Tufts University.
[9] Additional support for the Perseus project has been provided over the years by the Annenberg Foundation, Apple Inc., the Berger Family Technology Transfer Endowment, the Digital Libraries Initiative Phase 2, the Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education part of the U.S. Department of Education, the Getty Grant program, the Modern Language Association, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Science Foundation, the Packard Humanities Institute, Xerox, Boston University, and Harvard University.