Digital Libraries and Europeana (Europe’s Digital Portal and Library for Cultural Heritage) are the heart of EU’s Digital Agenda for Europe. Research related to this topic include aspects of knowledge representation, digitization of Cultural Heritage assets, data harmonization and building ontologies for specific Cultural Heritage domains. In this context, we have received a private grant of US$ 150 000 from the Leventis Foundation, aimed at the creation of the Digital Ancient Cypriot Literature (DACL).

The DACL project aims at the creation of a new searchable digital library of Ancient Cypriot Literature (Αρχαία Κυπριακή Γραμματεία), the impressive six volume corpus led by Profs. Patroklos Stavrou, Andreas Voskos, Costas Michaelides and Ioannis Taifacos published by the Leventis Foundation between 1995 and 2008. This digital library will be prepared, hosted and maintained by STARC. The corpus covers the ancient Cypriot literary production in a time span of c. fifteen centuries (from 7th century BC to 5th-6th century AD) and examines it through its wide range of literary genres (epic, lyric and dramatic poetry, epigram, prose etc.). Each volume contains a sketch of the history of each genre, information on the writers and their works, as well as the texts themselves (Ancient Greek and Latin) accompanied by translations in Modern Greek, detailed commentaries, lists of different manuscript readings of the texts, a rich Bibliography, and an Index. The Archaia Kypriaki Grammateia corpus consists of 3603 pages in total and comprises the literary work of sixty four Cypriot – or, in some cases, thought to be Cypriot – writers as well as seventy two epigrams composed by various authors.

The benefits and outcomes of research in the domain of digital libraries for Cultural Heritage are numerous and go well beyond a restricted scientific community. Firstly and most obviously, activity in this domain is cross-disciplinary, bridging between arts and sciences, social sciences and informatics, human-computer interaction and cognitive sciences.

The interdisciplinary structure of The Cyprus Institute served as a model of interaction between scientists of various disciplines and has fostered collaborations with major Cultural Heritage stakeholders in the region, creating a unique and wide research network with an extraordinary momentum for future activities. Finally, the add-on value to the worldwide citizen is inestimable, providing him with access to a huge amount of knowledge about Cypriot Cultural Heritage following rigorous, scientific based standards and easily understandable to all.