Discover, annotate, compare, and connect more than
75,000 rare books and manuscripts from earliest times to the 20th century.

Publish your own scholarly digital edition in an
ever-expanding network of full-text primary and secondary resources.

Take advantage of placing your research within the wider
community of scholars revolutionising humanities scholarship today.

PRISMS is a flexible Open Scholarship platform with the potential to aggregate all digitised primary source material and the associated scholarship in a semantic network. PRISMS currently hosts over 75,000 digital editions of rare books and manuscripts from earliest times to the 20th century. Learn more...

Get the most out of PRISMS in three easy steps!

1. Create and aggregate your primary source materials and scholarship:

  • search and browse tens of thousands of digital editions already included;
  • retrieve and bookmark editions to easily resume where you left off;
  • add new editions from trusted repositories, and enrich them with transcriptions, translations, apparatus, and other accompanying resources;
  • create and publish your own digital editions on PRISMS;
  • add your own external resources to editions—which are then embedded in PRISMS—for example, add a facsimile from one source, which can then be viewed alongside a transcription from a different source.

2. Annotate, compare, and connect your sources and secondary materials:

  • view multiple editions side-by-side in a flexible workbench;
  • embed facsimiles, translations, scholarship, performances, such as IIIF manifests, PDFs, video or audio, websites, and other relevant online resources;
  • create notebooks to record a transcription, add a commentary or bibliography, or keep a personal research record;
  • use the available component tools, such as adding annotations to texts and images;
  • flexibly add named entities within and across texts;
  • visualise texts with Voyant Tools right within PRISMS;
  • use the integrated graph view to collaboratively model, visualise, explore, and enhance relationships;
  • use a variety of means, including the ontologically-underpinned graph view itself, to create knowledge.

3. Publish your edition and scholarship:

  • organize and keep a structured overview of your scholarly work (bookmarking, annotating, modelling, writing, organising, sharing) with the workbench toolbox;
  • place your own scholarly digital edition in an ever-expanding, discoverable network of full-text primary and secondary resources;
  • flexibly, download, share, and publish your contributions for the benefit of collaborative scholarship online;
  • participate in and benefit from a community of open scholarship practitioners, and engage in resource sharing, collaboration, and knowledge exchange.

Congratulations! You have made a lasting contribution to Open Scholarship for the benefit of all.

  • Open Scholarship in PRISMS means leveraging the power of open data, open access, open standards, and open tools to create an environment where scholarship can be shared as it is created;
  • Take advantage of placing your research within the wider community of scholars revolutionising humanities scholarship today;
  • Curious? Want to learn more? There are four short tutorial videos available that cover the functionality currently offered by PRISMS;
  • Read more about the background and motivation, and the available collections, tools, and standards and technologies that power PRISMS.