1. The institutional context of the Archimedes Project

The Archimedes Project deals with the entire tradition of mechanical knowledge that is so closely associated with the name of Archimedes and his achievements. The Archimedes Project is a proof-of-concept endeavor for an open digital research library in the history of science that proposes to combine research and dissemination in a new way. It closely integrates scholarly work and technical developments.

The project would not have been possible without the tight collaboration of American and European partners who have not only invested previous experience in this project, but who also share a commitment to open access without which the vision of an open digital research library would be impossible to accomplish. The Archimedes Project is a joint endeavor of

• the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin,
• the Classics Department at Harvard University,
• the English Department at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and
• the Perseus Project at Tufts University.

The project is being executed within a wider network of scholarly cooperation including the Programme International de Coopération Scientifique (PICS) . It is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) of the United States in the framework of the NSF-DFG International Digital Library Initiative .

The German principal investigators of the project are:

• Jürgen Renn ( MPIWG )
• Peter Damerow ( MPIWG )
• Urs Schoepflin ( MPIWG ).

The US principal investigators of the project are:

• Mark Schiefsky ( Harvard University )
• Jeffrey Rydberg-Cox ( Univ. of Missouri )
• Gregory Crane ( Tufts University ).

The project staff includes Brian Fuchs ( MPIWG ), Malcolm D. Hyman ( Harvard ), Elaheh Kheirandish ( Harvard ), Peter McLaughlin ( MPIWG ), Marcus Popplow ( MPIWG ), Markus Schnöpf ( MPIWG ), David Smith ( Perseus Project ).