The DLL Catalog is one of two major research projects of the Digital Latin Library. Its purpose is to build a stable, reliable, openly available resource for finding and using Latin texts of all eras. The DLL's other major project is the Library of Digital Latin Texts (LDLT), which aims to publish new, born-digital critical editions of Latin texts. The DLL Catalog complements the LDLT by providing a tool for identifying and organizing authors, titles, and the many editions and versions currently available on the internet.
Content
The DLL Catalog contains two categories of information.
Authority records are the heart of the catalog, and they serve a number of purposes. Their main purpose is to identify unambiguously authors and works. For example, Publius Vergilius Maro is also known as Vergil and Virgil. His authority record gathers all of that information and a lot else besides so that users looking for Vergil, Virgil, or even phi0690 (one of his many identifiers) will be able to find him. Similarly, there are dozens of works known by the generic title Carmina. Authority records for works distinguish Catullus' Carmina from Alcuin's.
Individual items are records of texts available in one form or another on the internet. Each individual item is linked to its authority record(s), and it also include links to the sites where they can be found, information about copyright protections, availability, and (if known) the original source of the text.
Using the Catalog
Users may search the catalog using the search bar that appears on all pages. Start with an author's name or the title of a work. The results can be refined using the filters that appear in the menu bars to the right of the results.
The search engine will return results matching the term if it appears in one or more fields we've selected in the DLL Catalog's content types. The following icons in the result list indicate an item's content type:
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Author authority record. This content type contains information about an author, with links to work authority pages and other related content. |
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Work authority record. This content type contains information about a work, with links to information about its author(s) and specific versions of it. |
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Digitized book. This content type contains information about a specific digitized book, such as a pdf file of a critical edition. |
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Digital text. This content type contains information about a text available in a markup language such as HTML or XML. |
Users may also find content by using the catalog's browsing pages. Browsing pages are available for authors, works, item records, and webpages. Author and work browsing pages are dynamically generated based on the ID of an authority record. Since all of the catalog's content is interlinked via reciprocal entity references, the browsing page for an author will display content from the authority record for the author, any related authority records for works, and links to related individual items.
In keeping with our commitment to Linked Open Data, the catalog's data are also available for downloading in the JSON-LD format. Individual files for author authorities, work authorities, and item records are available at https://github.com/DigitalLatin/DLL-Catalog-Linked-Open-Data. They are updated whenever new content is added to the catalog.