Building a Digital Research Infrastructure for Ancient Written Cultures: The Biblissima Initiative

Description

Notes (French)

Abstract (English)

The Biblissima portal is a discovery tool for specialized digital resources in the field of ancient written heritage, ranging from the earliest Mesopotamian clay tablets to the first printed books. The portal was launched in 2017 and has since continuously ensured the interoperability of diverse and complementary data sources. The portal thus aggregates digital data on early manuscripts, incunabula and printed works, and provides access to digitised documents, catalogues, scientific databases, illuminations, an iconographic thesaurus and soon electronic editions.

The Biblissima portal stands out as an innovative tool for several reasons:

• It provides a unified access point to heterogeneous digital resources, serving both the general public and the most specialised researchers in the field.
• It enables the post hoc aggregation and interoperability of disparate datasets, building a reference tool that no single source provider could produce independently.
• It utilises the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) standard for disseminating images online, allowing direct access to primary document images, along with advanced features where available (such as full-text search, content indexes, and annotations).
• It offers innovative, user-friendly search and navigation interfaces, including an iconographic exploration tool, providing a structured and efficient starting point for researcher’s investigation while encouraging critical reading of the search results without masking the shortcomings of the source databases or their contradictions.

The portal facilitates direct access to resources that are otherwise difficult for the general public to reach. It also establishes itself as a reference tool for research in the field of ancient written cultures, whose authority is being built up over time, in conjunction with the other research communities that develop components of the broader infrastructure (such as tools for analysing and processing primary data, such as the eScriptorium HTR platform). It thus plays a stabilising and consolidating role for each of its data sources, while providing undeniable added value in terms of international visibility.