Lisa Cerrato

Beyond digital incunabula: modeling the next generation of digital libraries

This paper describes several incunabular assumptions that impose upon early digital libraries the limitations drawn from print, and argues for a design strategy aimed at providing customization and personalization services that go beyond the limiting models of print distribution, based on services and experiments developed for the Greco-Roman collections in the Perseus Digital Library. Three features fundamentally characterize a successful digital library design: finer granularity of collection objects, automated processes, and decentralized community contributions.

Student researchers, citizen scholars and the trillion word library

The surviving corpora of Greek and Latin are relatively compact but the shift from books and written objects to digitized texts has already challenged students of these languages to move away from books as organizing metaphors and to ask, instead, what do you do with a billion, or even a trillion, words? We need a new culture of intellectual production in which student researchers and citizen scholars play a central role. And we need as a consequence to reorganize the education that we provide in the humanities, stressing participatory learning, and supporting a virtuous cycle where students contribute data as they learn and learn in order to contribute knowledge. We report on five strategies that we have implemented to further this virtuous cycle: (1) reading environments by which learners can work with languages that they have not studied, (2) feedback for those who choose to internalize knowledge about a particular language, (3) methods whereby those with knowledge of different languages can collaborate to develop interpretations and to produce new annotations, (4) dynamic reading lists that allow learners to assess and to document what they have mastered, and (5) general e-portfolios in which learners can track what they have accomplished and document what they have contributed and learned to the public or to particular groups.