Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (case study)

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OVERVIEW

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Thesaurus Linguae Graecae® was chosen by Ithaka as a case study in Sustainability to demonstrate a real world example of a theoretical business model. These business models were outlined in the initial report by Kevin Guthrie, Rebecca Griffiths and Nancy Maron, Sustainability and Online Revenue Models: An Ithaka Report (May 2008).

Background

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Hosted at the University of California, Irvine, the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae® (TLG®) is a compendium of more than 105 million words of digitised Greek-language content from the 8th-century BCE to the modern era. As the project has grown, it has steadily diversified its revenue streams, gradually expanding to institutional and individual subscription fees, direct funding from the host university, and a project endowment. Today, each of these three sources accounts for a significant portion of the project’s annual revenue.

The project has been able to attract these diverse funding streams in part because of the highly specialised nature of the content, which is indispensable to classics scholars. The TLG endowment was founded in the 1990s to supplement the project’s subscription income, in recognition of the need to monetise its value to scholars while keeping the price at a reasonable level. While the project has expanded its revenue streams, it also strives to lower costs through digitisation outsourcing and an extended five-year billing cycle.

The same issues which face the TLG also challenge other historical digitization projects for specialised audiences. Such resources can be strong candidates for a subscription model, but other issues complicate this: charging for content related to cultural heritage can be controversial, users may need specialised tools and functionality beyond access to digitised texts, and out-of-copyright text may be vulnerable to competition from mass digitisation projects. The TLG, which is nearing its 40 th anniversary as a computerised source of Greek-language texts, provides a valuable case study in the survival and growth of a historical content digital resource.

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