Hellinomnimon is a digital library which consists of all the philosophical and scientific manuscripts written in Greek from 1600 to 1821. The first phase of Hellinomnimon has been completed from September 1995 to September 1997. This phase involved the process of digitizing all the books. The second phase involves the analogous processes for the manuscripts and is projected to be completed by 2002.
The totality of the philosophical and scientific corpus written in the Greek language from 1600 to 1821 consists of two large categories. The first category consists of the books which had been published in Vienna, Venice, Paris, Constantinople, and Leipzig. These comprise 204 volumes of 53,000 pages in total. The second category contains the manuscripts - those written by the respective authors or the copies of extant originals. These make up a volume of over 500,000 pages. Among other places, these manuscripts are to be found in the various National and private libraries in Greece, France and Russia, in the Library of the Patriarchates in Istanbul, Jerusalem and Alexandria, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, in various libraries of Turkey as well as in libraries of monasteries in Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria and Russia.
Hellinomnimon has been realised at the Laboratory for the Electronic Processing of Historical Archives of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science of the University of Athens.
The aim of the Laboratory is to support research and teaching by the development and application of modern technologies in photography, caloguing, archiving and digital image processing for historical archives and digital libraries.
Such a collection of documents will be decisive in the study of the issues related to the introduction of the new sciences to the Greek speaking world during the 18th century: In the study of what it means for ideas that originated in a particular cultural and historical setting to have been «transmitted» into a different cultural milieu with different intellectual traditions and different political and educational institutions.
The whole project of cataloguing, photographing and digitizing will also result in a unique collection of hitherto unknown Greek works. This material enriched with the biographies of the authors and other historical data, and is already available in a series of CD-ROMs to institutions and individual researchers.