About the Perseus Art and Archaeology Collection
Welcome to an experimental new home for the Perseus Art & Archaeology (A&A) collection. This alpha release of a new interface and access to the images and collection metadata is powered by CollectionBuilder and AirTable and includes images and extensive metadata for a large library of vases (1909), coins (1305), gems (140), sculptures (2003), sites (179) and buildings (424) from the Ancient Mediterranean world.
The Perseus Art & Artifact Browser in its legacy format on the Perseus Digital Library P4 website has been available since 2004, but the metadata there cannot be updated, enhanced or corrected, and image viewing capabilities have greatly advanced in the past 20 years. The A&A collections have been an integral part of Perseus since the release of Perseus 1.0, then described as “a multimedia interactive library,” but newer efforts by Perseus, including the Scaife Viewer and Beyond Translation, have focused far more on textual data, annotations and related reading tools rather than images of the ancient world and its material objects.
This alpha release offers a new interface to the Perseus A&A Collection as well as the underlying metadata available for download as CSV, JSON, or RDF files on GitHub.
As in the previous browsing environment, each object includes a descriptive catalog entry, composed by Perseus editors, and, typically, corresponding images and/or illustrations. Many images were collected via custom photography for Perseus. The resulting collection is a collaboration with scholars, researchers, curators, museums and cultural heritage institutions.
These descriptions and images were produced in collaboration with many scholars, museums and cultural heritage institutions over 25 to 30 years ago.
Basic information about the objects has been taken from a number of different standard sources, each of which are cited in the object entries. Descriptive keywords were created for each object by the Perseus editors. An extensive bibliography, once available with the A&A collection, will eventually be published online as part of this new release with links where available to bibliographic sources that are either open access or in the public domain.
Moving forward, we are currently engaged in a large-scale metadata cleanup, consolidation and enhancement project and welcome user feedback, error reports and comments on this new viewing experience.