https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111508788-009 Monica Berti Digital Canons and Catalogs of Fragmentary Literature 1 Authors and Works in Ancient Libraries and Catalogs When the Ptolemies founded the Library at Alexandria in the third century BC, one of the first needs was to collect and arrange all the books in the inhabited world.1 In spite of contradictory figures mentioned by ancient authors about the storage of the Alexan- drian collections, the result of this effort was the beginning of a monumental philologi- cal work that produced commentaries, lexica, excerpts and library catalogs. Still surviv- ing sources preserve traces of this work and the fragments of the Pinakes of Callimachus are traditionally considered the remains of a pioneering catalog of ancient literature.2 Modern scholars have been looking for these traces in order to reconstruct methods and contributions of ancient philologists and obtain information about Clas- sical authors and works. Collecting references to ancient works means first of all to explore and analyze the language used by ancient authors when citing and referring to other authors and works, and secondly to translate and convert the expressions of this language into canons, catalogs, and indices.3 This investigation has also allowed scholars to discover and extract traces of lost authors and works, beginning an editorial practice that is part of what we call fragmentary literature and that has been producing countless collections of printed critical editions of lost intellectuals.4 Catalogs and indices of authors and works are the result of this philological analy- sis, but their entries are mostly in Latin or in modern languages and only an analytical and separate reading of the passages collected in these resources provides an insight into the language used by ancient authors to express bibliographic citations, such as references to other authors and to titles and descriptions of other works. Even if lin- guistic annotations of ancient Greek and Latin are growing, we still miss collections and annotations of entities pertaining to authors and works extracted from ancient sources 1 Aristeae Ep. 9. 2 Berti/Costa (2010) and Berti (2016) with bibliography. 3 Broggiato (2014), Nicolai (2013), Nicolai (2014), Matijašić (2018) and Montanari (2020). See now also Davies/Harris (2019), 62–70 and 93–98, and Marzo Magno (2020), 10–14 on the role of Aldus Manutius in the history of canon formation and indexing of Classical works. 4 Most (1997) and Most (2009). Note: This paper and the results described in it are published thanks to the generous support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinaschaft (project nr. 434173983).