This collection is part of the digital repository of historical sources on the history of science. The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin (MPIWG) has made available its collection of rare books concerning the history of mechanics, statics, mathematics, geometry, architecture and other thematic fields, that represent the corpus of source texts which are actually in the focus of the research activities of the MPIWG.

The "database machine drawings" (DMD) is part of the research project "The Relation of Practical Experience and Conceptual Structures in the Emergence of Science: Mental Models in the History of Mechanics," a project pursued by Department I of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), Berlin. In its context, a large number of original sources concerning the history of mechanics have been made available on the Internet as a digital research library, the "Archimedes Project." In this broader context the database DMD is especially devoted to studying the practical knowledge of early modern engineers.

In cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Biblioteca degli Intronati di Siena has made available some of their rare manuscripts on the history of mechanics.

The digital repository of historical sources on the history of science deals also with full texts in xml-format. The ECHO project demands powerful, linguistically based information technology for handling the variety of languages occurring in the source materials. Source documents are being prepared with tools such as automatic morphological analysis of Latin, Greek, Italian, Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Dutch and Arabic, as well as the automatic linking of sources to open accessible modern and historical dictionaries and reference works. This search interface finds all sentences in the selected texts which contain the entered words as well as all forms belonging to the same dictionary head word or words as the entered words. The tool for morphological search is under construction and is, at this time, only usable for resources within the ARCHIMEDES collection.

The Archimedes Project is the digital library component of a major research project of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science dealing with mental models in the history of mechanics. The library contains key primary sources documenting the development from ancient to early modern mechanics. The collection browser of the project coordinates images and text and links the texts by means of language technology to dictionaries.
The project would not have been possible without the tight collaboration of American and European partners who have not only invested previous experience in this project, but who also share a commitment to open access without which the vision of an open digital research library would be impossible to accomplish.
Ongoing research at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin on the long-term development of mental models of mechanical thinking and their manifestation in technical terminologies, inferences of practitioners, engineers, and scientists plays an important role in the testbed design. The testbed also requires a powerful, linguistically based information technology for handling the variety of languages occurring in the source materials. Source documents are being prepared with tools such as automatic morphological analysis of Latin, Greek and Italian, and semantic linking of sources to general and technical, modern and historical dictionaries and reference works.