大英圖書館將古希臘手稿搬上網絡
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.
John Franklin, an associate professor of classics at the University of Vermont, said that the British Library's efforts were "part of a quite general move to making manuscripts available online." "Hundreds of institutions have done or are doing the same," he said, including his university.
Franklin said it was "wonderful that the general public can have an intimate view of so many manuscripts," but stressed the material's academic applications, noting that it could serve as a teaching aid for students learning to unravel medieval Greek handwriting, for example.
The British Library has worked aggressively to put much of its collection on the Internet, 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 is due to be published online in 2012.
近年來越來越多的古文獻被放到網上，作爲世界上最重要的藏書之一，古希臘手稿也即將在網上露面。
大英圖書館週一稱，該館正着手將其庫藏的多達1000卷的古希臘手稿中的250卷搬上網絡，提供免費閱讀。管理員們希望此舉可以讓史學工作者、聖經學者及學習古希臘著作的學生受益。
儘管這些手稿長期以來一直對造訪大英圖書館閱覽室的學者們開放，但管理員斯科特•麥肯德里克稱，把這些手稿放到網上可以讓全世界的人們都有機會閱讀這些古籍。手稿的精髓部分包括1842年在希臘阿索斯山發現的著名的《伊索寓言》故事集。
麥肯德里克說，如果要仔細研讀字跡小而模糊的古希臘文本，對着數百頁羊皮紙字斟句酌，那麼在倫敦可能要花不少錢。
他說，“並非每位學者都可以負擔得起連續數週或數月來這裏的花費。在線閱覽文本非常吸引人的一個地方在於“你能夠隨時坐在自己的桌前閱讀，而且是免費閱讀”。
近年來，通過谷歌圖書的批量化圖書掃描工作雖然已有數以百萬計的圖書都能夠讓人們在線閱覽，但是要把古文本從圖書館搬到網上所花費的時間卻要長得多。
把這些古書放在網上雖然不像當代作品那樣需要應對繁雜的版權問題，但是這些古書極易破損，因而處理起來也有難度。這些滿是裂紋的古書必須小心翼翼地打開，一頁一頁地掃描，據大英圖書館說，每掃描一頁一般需花費1英鎊（1.5美元）。
佛蒙特大學古典文學副教授約翰•富蘭克林說，“把手稿放在網上已變得相當普遍”，大英圖書館此舉是其中的“一部分”。他還說，包括他所在的大學在內，“數百家機構已經做了或正在做同樣的事。”
富蘭克林說，“公衆可以詳細閱讀這麼多手稿確實很棒。”同時他強調了這些材料的學術價值，並舉例指出它可以作爲教學輔助工具，幫助那些學習破解中古希臘語的學生。
大英圖書館已經做了大量工作，將許多館藏都放到了網上，既有19世紀的報紙，也有收藏的瑰寶，其中包括《林迪斯芳福音書》、精選的列奧納多•達•芬奇的素描，還有現存的最古老的基督教聖經完整版本《西奈抄本》。
該館的古希臘手稿上網項目由斯塔弗洛斯•尼阿科斯基金會資助，該基金會支持與希臘相關的文化藝術活動。
另一批文獻（大約250份）預計於2012年在網上發佈。
Vocabulary:
cache: a hidden store of things（祕密）貯存物
boon: something that is very helpful and makes life easier for you（非常有用的東西；益處）
pore over something: 認真研讀
on end: for the stated length of time, without stopping（連續地；不斷地）
notably: to a great degree（極大程度上；非常）
unravel: to explain something that is difficult to understand or is mysterious; to become clearer or easier to understand（闡釋；說明；澄清；變得清楚易懂）
