DLL Catalog

Plenty of other projects already publish as many texts as they can under one domain, some on an open basis (e.g., The Perseus Project and The Latin Library), others with copyright restrictions (e.g., The Packard Humanities Institute's Classical Latin Texts) or behind a subscription paywall (e.g., Brepol's Library of Latin Texts). The DLL does not seek to compete with these projects, other than by publishing new, born-digital, critical editions of texts in its Library of Digital Latin Texts.

Similarly, any general search engine (e.g., Google, Bing, Duckduckgo, etc.) can be used to find Latin texts online. The DLL certainly does not have the resources to compete with them on that front.

The purpose of the DLL Catalog is to provide a stable, reliable, openly available Linked Data resource for identifying Latin texts available online. It aims to do this by applying the best practices of Library and Information Science to publish authoritative records for authors, their works, and individual versions of those works.

Authority records are the foundation of the DLL Catalog. They provide anchors for specific instances of Latin texts so that the various ways of spelling the names of authors and the titles of works will not stymie efforts of users to find what they need.

For example, Virgil (or Vergil, or Vergilius, or Publius Vergilius Maro) wrote a work called Eclogues (or Eclogae, or Bucolica). If a user wants to browse the works of Virgil, all of those works, regardless of the spelling of their title or the author’s name, should be included in the results. We accomplish this by anchoring every instance of a work to a work authority and, if the author is known, to an author authority. All of the search and browse features of the DLL’s Catalog depend on these records.

Please visit https://catalog.digitallatin.org/ to learn more about the DLL Catalog and its research initiatives.