The Archimedes Project will create a testbed for developing and exploring model interactive environments for the history of mechanics. It will also serve as a proof-of-concept project for open digital libraries for topics in the history of science designed to integrate research and knowledge dissemination in new ways.
The testbed also requires a powerful, linguistically based information technology for handling the variety of languages occurring in the source materials. Source documents are being prepared with tools such as automatic morphological analysis of Latin, Greek and Italian, and semantic linking of sources to general and technical, modern and historical dictionaries and reference works.

• Arboreal (content-based XML browser and annotation environment
• Donatus (morphological analysis for XML texts)
• Pollux (direct access to dictionaries)

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digilib supports a wide range of image formats and viewing options on the server side while only requiring an internet browser with javascript and a low bandwidth internet connection on the client side.
digilib enables very detailed work on an image as required by scientists with elaborate zoom features like an option to show images on the screen in their original size. digilib facilitates cooperation of scientists over the internet and novel uses of source material by image annotations and stable references that can be embedded in URLs. digilib is open source software jointly developed by the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin and the University of Bern. It is currently used by several Max Planck Institutes and other projects, e.g. the Museum Kassel uses a modified version of digilib linked to its Online Catalogue.
As part of the electronic workbench digilib is currently under development. Already now some of the standard elements are used for the construction of web presentations and support for sharing electronic documents.
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The Arboreal XML browser is a powerful and flexible tool developed by the Archimedes Project for content-based access to, and annotation of, XML texts. Arboreal includes special features for working with parallel versions of texts, morphology and terminology, and linked images. Integrated language support is currently provided for Latin, Greek, Arabic, Chinese, languages written in cuneiform, and major western European languages. Arboreal supports many standards and is designed as a cross-platform tool that can be used on many different computing systems.
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Virtual Spaces (VSpace) is a Java tool for the structured represention of knowledge. It is developed at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science by Julia Damerow. Texts, images and hyperlinks can be organized in 2D graphs. These graphs are then used to generate HTML files to create virtual tours. The virtual tours can also be exported as PDF or RTF files.

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ELAN (EUDICO Linguistic Annotator) is an annotation tool that allows you to create, edit, visualize and search annotations for video and audio data. It was developed at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, with the aim to provide a sound technological basis for the annotation and exploitation of multi-media recordings. ELAN is specifically designed for the analysis of language, sign language, and gesture, but it can be used by everybody who works with media corpora, i.e., with video and/or audio data, for purposes of annotation, analysis and documentation. ELAN supports:

• display a speech and/or video signals, together with their annotations;
• time linking of annotations to media streams;
• linking of annotations to other annotations;
• unlimited number of annotation tiers as defined by the users;
• different character sets;
• export as tab-delimited text files;
• im- and export between ELAN and Shoebox;
• search options.
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The Virtual Lightbox for Museums and Archives (VLMA) is an educational tool for collecting and reusing in a structured fashion the online contents of museums and archives with visual components. With VLMA, you can browse and search collections, construct personal collections, export these collections to xml or Impress presentation format, annotate them, and share your collections with other VLMA users.
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