Ten years ago today, a private American collector purchased the Archimedes
Palimpsest. Since that time he has guided and funded the project to
conserve, image, and study the manuscript. After ten years of work,
involving the expertise and goodwill of an extraordinary number of people
working around the world, the Archimedes Palimpsest Project has released its
data. It is a historic dataset, revealing new texts from the ancient world.
It is an integrated product, weaving registered images in many wavebands of
light with XML transcriptions of the Archimedes and Hyperides texts that are
spatially mapped to those images. It has pushed boundaries for the imaging
of documents, and relied almost exclusively on current international
standards. We hope that this dataset will be a persistent digital resource
for the decades to come. We also hope it will be helpful as an example for
others who are conducting similar work. It published under a Creative
Commons 3.0 attribution license, to ensure ease of access and the potential
for widespread use. A complete facsimile of the revealed palimpsested texts
is available on Googlebooks as ³The Archimedes Palimpsest². It is hoped
that this is the first of many uses to which the data will be put.

For information on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, please visit:
http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org

For the dataset, please visit:
http://www.archimedespalimpsest.net

We have set up a discussion forum on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project. Any
member can invite anybody else to join. If you want to become a member,
please email:

wnoel@thewalters.org

I would be grateful if you would circulate this to your friends and
colleagues.

Thank you very much
Will Noel
The Walters Art Museum
October 29th, 2008.