Imagine having a database for Latin literature that would be accessible through some interface such as this one:
This Repertorium Omnium Litterarum Latinarum would not primarily be a way of linking to the texts themselves or discovering various editions or locating manuscripts, but it would inventory the particular titles and make them discoverable by the application of various filters. You could search the vast corpus of Latinity across all disciplines by author, title, type of writing, subject, date-range, and provenance, using such categories singly or in combination. A searchable "notes" field for each record could include a wide range of data that might be helpful to researchers.
ROLL would be easily and quickly searchable in a way that printed volumes cannot be; it would cover all disciplines, authors, major types of publications, and periods; and it would be easily correctible and expandable. It would be cross-temporal, cross-disciplinary, cross-regional, and cross-cultural. It could serve a wide and diverse range of scholars. Researchers would be able to find works written in a particular subject-area (viniculture or optics or prosody or myth, for example) from any particular time-span, or by any given author, or with reference to any given locale.
For more on this proposal, click here.
