Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies

Business Initiatives

CHS represents the best scholarship has to offer in classics but their information-rich website made the research monotonous and publications hard to find – for Greek enthusiasts and the dedicated scholar alike.

“The website is a crucial part of the research efforts and new identity of CHS – we want to lower access barriers to good scholarly information about Greece and present it in the best possible way,” explains Leonard Muellner, the Center’s Director for IT and Publications. Integrating the wealth of mini-sites, existing databases and external sources into a more logical structure allowed users to find what they need quickly without getting lost in a sea of Homeric content.

The Solution

CHS was very interested in an open-source content management system (CMS) application – they found Axiom to be an easy-to-use and powerful publishing tool. With several hundred pages, Axiom allows them to manage this content while reducing the number of people who need to work on it – reducing overall costs to maintain the website.

A notable feature of Axiom that kept things simple for CHS was the support of UTF-8 which allows CHS to manage the many languages and alphabets that proliferate in their content. They have many existing XML publications that are fed through Axiom to style, format and index – this additional capability applied to Axiom allows CHS to utilize a great tool.

Ancient scrolls with writings of Homer on Papyrus – and, to date, the most popular aspect of CHS’s website – were digitized for presentation on the Web so the world could see and read them, search keywords and scan. Crucial to the success of the website was a keyword and document search capability. English narration and interpretations of these texts were added. CHS was able to leverage the standard informational power of Axiom CMS from the start as it provided an easy way for them to have searchable pages. Their online books are published in TEI XML (dialect of XML for formatting books similar to DocBook). Axiom allowed CHS to upload their books in their preexisting formats and push them to the appropriate places in the website through the Axiom publishing mechanisms. CHS was even able to leverage their XML style sheets (XSL).

Muellner concludes, “We want to validate online publication as a legitimate scholarly enterprise, measuring our success by the ease of our technical solution and the prestige of our site as a locus for publication as well as the traffic it gets. We are in a position to make Web publishing as valid as any other if we do it well in terms of content and presentation. We’re thrilled with the way it worked out. The site has a kind of elegance and just the right feel to it – which was not easy to get.”