Work/Source Library

Source Library

The world's largest open-access library of translated ancient sources, for scholars, seekers, and AI alike.

sourcelibrary.org

The rediscovery of ancient texts helped spark the Renaissance. Source Library does that work again, at far greater scale. Frond Studio consults on its design, development and continued growth.

Much of humanity's foundational knowledge is still locked in undigitised, untranslated books. Source Library digitises them, reads them with OCR, translates them, and opens them to people and machines alike.

Client

Source Library

Services

Consulting

Strategy

Design

Dev

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The library, in numbers

As of June 2026

16,079

Books

Rare and foundational works, digitised and OCR'd.

5,669

First-ever translations

Texts put into English for the first time.

160+

Languages

Source languages across the collection.

190,769

Illustrations

Figures, maps and woodcuts, extracted automatically.

Collections, gallery and image intelligence

Every figure inside the books, found and tagged

Source Library opens the pictures inside the books, not just the words. Collections and a gallery let you browse them, with a lightbox for close looking. Advanced AI systems read every scanned page to find, extract, tag, categorise and caption the illustrations, figures and diagrams buried in the texts, so an image you could never have searched for becomes findable in seconds.

The Librarian

An AI assistant for the whole collection

Ask in plain language and the Librarian finds, summarises and cross-references across thousands of translated sources. It is open to machines too: an MCP server, a CLI and an API let other AI tools read the library directly.

sourcelibrary.org

The Librarian, the Source Library AI assistant.

“Ficino translated Plato, Plotinus and the Hermetica into Latin, making them readable across Europe for the first time. It helped start the Renaissance. Source Library continues that work.”
On Marsilio Ficino, 1433 to 1499