大英图书馆将古希腊手稿搬上网络

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.

近年来越来越多的古文献被放到网上，作为世界上最重要的藏书之一，古希腊手稿也即将在网上露面。

大英图书馆周一称，该馆正着手将其库藏的多达1000卷的古希腊手稿中的250卷搬上网络，提供免费阅读。管理员们希望此举可以让史学工作者、圣经学者及学习古希腊著作的学生受益。

尽管这些手稿长期以来一直对造访大英图书馆阅览室的学者们开放，但管理员斯科特．麦肯德里克称，把这些手稿放到网上可以让全世界的人们都有机会阅读这些古籍。手稿的精髓部分包括1842年在希腊阿索斯山发现的著名的《伊索寓言》故事集。

麦肯德里克说，如果要仔细研读字迹小而模糊的古希腊文本，对着数百页羊皮纸字斟句酌，那么在伦敦可能要花不少钱。

他说，“并非每位学者都可以负担得起连续数周或数月来这里的花费。在线阅览文本非常吸引人的一个地方在于“你能够随时坐在自己的桌前阅读，而且是免费阅读”。

近年来，通过谷歌图书的批量化图书扫描工作虽然已有数以百万计的图书都能够让人们在线阅览，但是要把古文本从图书馆搬到网上所花费的时间却要长得多。

把这些古书放在网上虽然不像当代作品那样需要应对繁杂的版权问题，但是这些古书极易破损，因而处理起来也有难度。这些满是裂纹的古书必须小心翼翼地打开，一页一页地扫描，据大英图书馆说，每扫描一页一般需花费1英镑（1.5美元）。

佛蒙特大学古典文学副教授约翰．富兰克林说，“把手稿放在网上已变得相当普遍”，大英图书馆此举是其中的“一部分”。他还说，包括他所在的大学在内，“数百家机构已经做了或正在做同样的事。”

富兰克林说，“公众可以详细阅读这么多手稿确实很棒。”同时他强调了这些材料的学术价值，并举例指出它可以作为教学辅助工具，帮助那些学习破解中古希腊语的学生。

大英图书馆已经做了大量工作，将许多馆藏都放到了网上，既有19世纪的报纸，也有收藏的瑰宝，其中包括《林迪斯芳福音书》、精选的列奥纳多．达．芬奇的素描，还有现存的最古老的基督教圣经完整版本《西奈抄本》。

该馆的古希腊手稿上网项目由斯塔弗洛斯．尼阿科斯基金会资助，该基金会支持与希腊相关的文化艺术活动。

另一批文献（大约250份）预计于2012年在网上发布。

Vocabulary:

cache: a hidden store of things（秘密）贮存物

boon: something that is very helpful and makes life easier for you（非常有用的东西；益处）

pore over something: 认真研读

on end: for the stated length of time, without stopping（连续地；不断地）

notably: to a great degree（极大程度上；非常）

unravel: to explain something that is difficult to understand or is mysterious; to become clearer or easier to understand（阐释；说明；澄清；变得清楚易懂）