The DLL Catalog aims to provide a curated library-style catalog of texts available on the internet, whether as digitized books (e.g., pdf scans of books or e-books) or as pages in a markup language (e.g., html or xml). There are many ways of finding Latin texts online, including general search engines such as Google and the search and index pages of individual sites such as HathiTrust Digital Library or DigilibLT - The Digital library of late antique Latin texts. But, aside from some meta-sites such as the Corpus Scriptorum Latinorm and Bibliotheca Augustana, both of which are useful resources, there is no central, curated, Linked Open Data resource that provides faceted search and discovery tools for Latin texts of all eras. That is what the DLL Catalog aims to be.
There are two categories of content in the DLL Catalog: authority records for authors and works, and records of individual items that correspond to those works. The amount of content in both categories will continue to grow as we process the information in various collections. At launch, the DLL Catalog contained nearly 3,000 authory authority records and nearly 5,000 work authority records. View the updates log for information on the collections and individual items that have been processed and added to the DLL Catalog.
View the DLL Catalog's project queue.
The DLL Catalog is a finding aid for scholarly editions of Latin texts available online. It does not store any of those texts on its own server, but rather provides the system and information for locating them elsewhere. Although the DLL is working on a full-text search tool that will be released at some point in the future, the purpose of the DLL Catalog is to gather and publish information about texts available in other resources.
If you wish to perform full-text searches, several other options are available:
These are some of the most commonly used resources for searching full Latin texts.
You should use those sites as part of your research practice. They have vast amounts of information that might be useful to you. However, because the metadata records on those sites are often produced by machines or by catalogers who do not specialize in Latin, the information is not always accurate. Sometimes the inaccuracies are minor, but sometimes they are significant. The DLL Catalog also employs machine-assisted methods for ingesting, processing, and editing records, but professional Latinists and Latin students work to reduce the number of issues so that the data will be reliable for research and educational purposes.
A resource that deserves special attention here is the Perseus Catalog, which seeks to make data available on every Greek and Latin author and work from Classical antiquity, with links to at least one version of every text. It is a remarkable resource, and a wonderful example of the power of Linked Open Data.
We welcome comments, corrections, and suggestions. Send them to info@digitallatin.org. For other ways to contact us or to follow this project, please visit the contact page.
View a list of the people and organizations that have contributed to this site.
