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Mission and Goals

The DLL Project has a two-fold mission:

  • To publish and curate critical editions of Latin texts, of all types, from all eras, and to facilitate an ongoing scholarly conversation about these texts through open collaboration and annotation.
  • To facilitate the finding and, where openly available and accessible online, the reading of all texts written in Latin.

We aim to accomplish the first part of our mission with the Library of Digital Latin Texts, a series of new, born-digital critical editions published under the auspices of the three learned societies that have backed this project from the beginning: the Society for Classical Studies, the Medieval Academy of America, and the Renaissance Society of America. These learned societies represent and uphold the standards of professional scholarship in their respective fields, so they have control over what is published in the LDLT. Their publications and research divisions review proposals for new LDLT editions and determine which ones will bear their imprimatur. Once proposals have preliminary approval, the DLL works with editors to make sure that their work conforms to technical specifications established in consultation with the learned societies. The learned societies decide whether or not to publish the final product. Our operating principle is that there should be no doubt about the quality of the scholarship in an LDLT edition, since it bears the endorsement of the very organization that sets the standards for the discipline.

We aim to accomplish the second part of our mission through the DLL Catalog. Using data from the extensive user studies conducted in the second planning phase, we customized the catalog for finding and retrieving Latin texts, whether in the LDLT or elsewhere on the internet. It runs on an open-source Content Management System (CMS) with customized user interfaces for faceted searching of the catalog’s records. We continue to establish authority files for authors and works to facilitate discovery of texts through search and browse functions. In keeping with Linked Open Data practices, those authority files have fixed Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI’s) so that other projects can point to them with reliable results. The catalog's data is also be serialized in JSON-LD and CSV and freely available for reuse.

Photo by Adriano Pucciarelli Unsplash