Drudgery and deep thought

The article discusses problems confronted by Perseus Digital Library and other digital libraries. Support from the Digital Library Initiative, funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and other agencies has allowed Perseus to capitalize on a decade of developing a digital library on Greco-Roman antiquity and explore problems raised by other domains of humanities. An individual project can construct and publish amazingly rich data sets. While digital libraries aggregate these data sets, these systems work only with the data sets put into them. A fundamental challenge for scholars in all disciplines is therefore how to structure their publications so they may be integrated into larger units. Humanists are especially vulnerable to shifting standards and methods for preservation and publication. medium. Literature is notoriously intranslatable. Culture and language are inextricably intertwined. Thus system is needed that works more effectively with documents in the original source languages and digital libraries that automatically link as many complementary tools as possible.