http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100927/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_greek_manuscripts
LONDON – 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 Web in recent years.
The British Library said Monday 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 1842 — 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 of parchment.
"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 to the Web, but their
fragility makes them tough to handle. They have to be carefully cracked
open and photographed one page at a time, a process the British Library
said typically costs about 1 pound ($1.50) per page.
The library has moved aggressively to put large
swathes of its collection online, from 19th-century newspapers to the
jewels of its collection — The Lindisfarne Gospels, a selection of
Leonardo da Vinci's sketches and the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest surviving complete
copy of the Christian Bible.
The library's Greek manuscript project was funded by
the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, which supports Greek-related
initiatives in arts and culture.
Another batch of about 250 documents are due to be published online in 2012.