This site is intended to promote the use of open publishing of Latin resources. Latin benefits from a huge public domain — out of copyright works, and works that were never in copyright. This allows people to produce and reuse extremely valuable content.
The Internet age has allowed Latinists to benefit through sharing and creating new resources that we now all rely on. These include:
- Online digitised dictionaries, such as the Lewis and Short
- Digitisations of public domain texts
- A vast array of scanned books at Google, Europeana and Archive.org
- Entirely new content, such as Latin Wikipedia.
However, there many gaps, particularly in learning resources. There is also perhaps encouragement needed to help people to use open licensing when they publish or share materials, so that others can feel free to use them.
Open Licensing can be particularly powerful for educators. It can allow people to build upon and reuse works, that cannot take place when material is under copyright restrictions.
Latin often lacks these resources, or they are shared very informally. A committed community of educators using Open Licensing could make a tremendous difference to the future of Latin.
These are our aims:
- To promote the use and benefits of Open Licensing
- To build educational resources that can be reused, today
- To encourage modern authors to release Latin works to the public domain, either in or after their lifetimes
- To encourage current transcribers of public domain works
- to use Open Licences for their modifications, where copyright applies;
- to publish transcriptions on platforms such as Wikisource and Wikibooks so others can use them
- To ensure that Latin benefits from open infrastructure, such as text to speech tools
- To help commercial tools using Open Content make better provision for Latin
Please get involved
If you want to help, please get in touch. We will start off with some group communications, and take it from there!