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Old Greek documents uploaded to Internet
Source: Agencies |
September 28, 2010, Tuesday
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ONE of the world's most important caches of Greek manuscripts is going online, part of a growing number of ancient documents to hit the Internet in recent years.
The British Library said yesterday that it was making more than a quarter of its 1,000 volume-strong collection of handwritten Greek texts available online free of charge, something curators there hope will be a boon to historians, biblical scholars and students of classical Greece alike.
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.
McKendrick said that London could be an expensive place to spend time poring over the Greek texts' tiny, faded script or picking through hundreds of pages.
"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 online, but their fragility makes them tough to handle. They have to be carefully opened and photographed one page at a time, which costs about 1 pound (US$1.50) per page.
The British Library said yesterday that it was making more than a quarter of its 1,000 volume-strong collection of handwritten Greek texts available online free of charge, something curators there hope will be a boon to historians, biblical scholars and students of classical Greece alike.
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.
McKendrick said that London could be an expensive place to spend time poring over the Greek texts' tiny, faded script or picking through hundreds of pages.
"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 online, but their fragility makes them tough to handle. They have to be carefully opened and photographed one page at a time, which costs about 1 pound (US$1.50) per page.
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