This document summarizes Matthieu Bonicel's presentation on the Biblissima project at the LIBER Conference in Munich from June 26-28, 2013. The Biblissima project is a 7-year, €7.1 million effort led by the BnF to create an observatory of written heritage from the Middle Ages and Renaissance through digitizing materials and building interoperable databases. The project involves several academic partners and aims to make heritage materials more accessible and ensure the sustainability and interoperability of digital resources through standards like TEI and Shared Canvas.

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Biblissima
Bibliotheca bibliothecarum novissima
LIBER Conference in Munich 26-28th June 2013
Matthieu BONICEL

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LIBER conférence in Munich – 26-28th June 2013 2
Campus Condorcet

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LIBER conférence in Munich – 26-28th June 2013 3
Origins

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• 7 years (2012-2019)
• Observatory of written Heritage from
Middle Ages anf the Renaissance
(Arab, French, Greek, Hebrew, Latin
• Total budget is 7.1 M€
• 8-people technology/metadata team
LIBER Conference in Munich 26-28th June 2013

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LIBER Conference in Munich 26-28th June 2013 5
Partners
• BnF – Bibliothèque nationale de France
• IRHT - Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes (CNRS, Paris, Orléans)
• Campus Condorcet (Aubervilliers, La Plaine-Saint-Denis)
• CESR - Centre d’études supérieures la Renaissance (CNRS - Université François
Rabelais, Tours)
• CIHAM - Histoire, archéologie, littérature des mondes chrétiens et musulmans médiévaux
(Lyon)
• MRSH – Université de Caen
• EPHE – École pratique des hautes études (Paris)
• ENC – École nationale des chartes (Paris)
International support (hors implication financière) :
• Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino (SISMEL), Firenze, et Medioevo
europeo (Agostino PARAVICINI BAGLIANI)
• Department of Digital Humanities du King’s College de Londres (Andrew PRESCOTT et
Jan PALMOWSKI)
• E-codices : équipe d’édition électronique de l’université de Fribourg (Christoph FLÜELER)
• Bibliothèque virtuelle Manuscriptorium, Prague, Bibl. nationale de la République Tchèque
(Adolf KNOLL)
• Institut für Dokumentologie und Editorik, Graz – Köln (Georg VOGELER)
• Equipe d’édition électronique de l’université de Graz (Johannes STIGLER)
• Université Stanford (Digital Libraries systems and services, Tom CRAMER)

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Objectives
• Contribute to a better understanding of
text dissemination, history of libraries
and knowledge dissemination in
Europe from 8th to 18th centuries
• Make our information about Middle
Ages and Renaissance materials
accessible to the general audience
• Ensure sustainability and
interoperability of new and already
existing materials
LIBER Conference in Munich 26-28th June 2013

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The Team
Board of directors
Scientific
council
Executive
committee
Biblissima
Team
• Chief scientific: Anne-Marie Turcan.
• Associate: Nicole Bériou
• Observatory coordinator: Matthieu Bonicel. Co-coord :
Marjorie Burghart (e-learning), Pierre-Yves Buard (TEI),
Cyril Masset (Databases)
• Campus Condorcet: Johann Holland
• Project manager: Elizabeth McDonald
• Web developer: Régis Robineau
• Data: Stefanie Gehrke, Pauline Charbonnier, Anita
Mazur, Eduard Frunzeanu

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LIBER Conference in Munich 26-28th June 2013
The Portal
Over 50 databases
and catalogues
3 major digital
libraries
TEI editions and tool
for researchers
IIIF syntaxSharedCanvasRDF
Illuminations
Provenances
Authority files
Catalogues
Bindings
Gallica
BVMM
BVH
OpenSource
XML Editor
Production
environment
Publishing
toolkit
E-learning
tutorials

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Interoperability
LIBER Conference in Munich 26-28th June 2013
Current situation: a world of silos.

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Présentation du projet Biblissima (Matthieu BONICEL DCO/MSS/MIN) 10
SharedCanvas
• XML datamodel based on RDF and
OpenAnnotation
• Developped for 2 years in Stanford by the
Digital Manuscripts Technical Council.
• Specifications nearly finished. Actual phase
is to implement SharedCanvas manifests in
the partner institutions
• Documents and tests avaliable at
http://www.shared-canvas.org/

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Interoperability
LIBER Conference in Munich 26-28th June 2013

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Présentation du projet Biblissima (Matthieu BONICEL DCO/MSS/MIN) 12
SharedCanvas:
principles
• Producing an XML manifest for each document which is listing
avaliable ressources (one or several digitals docs, EAD
record, Mandragore descirptions, links to partner institutions)
• Each data producer is issuing its own manifest, linked to the
unique ID created by the library hosting the digital surrogate.
Partners can choose (or not) to mention other manifests in
their owns
• The manifest is also indentifying precisely the image or part of
image from which an annotation/editing has been made, so
the final user can go back to the original image.
• This datamodel was originally suggested by libraries which are
regurlarly involved in new collaborative projects with very low
standardization regarding the exchange of digital images.

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Interoperability
LIBER Conference in Munich 26-28th June 2013
Current situation: a world of silos.
Viewer
IIIF API
Preservation
system
Image server

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Roadmap
• Study of all the partners’ ressource
• Building up an ontology of the whole corpus
using CIDOC-CRM
• Starting developping prototype using
SharedCanvas instances and IIIF
compatible viewers
LIBER Conference in Munich 26-28th June 2013

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Présentation du projet Biblissima (Matthieu BONICEL DCO/MSS/MIN) 15
Ex: BnF
XML Refnum (sequence) EAD or MARC cataogue record
SharedCanvas manifest
Mandragore and Reliures
records
External viewer or tools
Gallica
Image Server
IIIF : Streaming images or parts of images
Browsing through the manifest
and adding external content
to it.

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Thank you!
Matthieu Bonicel
matthieu.bonicel@bnf.fr / +33 1 53 79 88 75
www.biblissima-condorcet.fr
Illustrations :
bandeau latéral : http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b8455949b/f16.item (BnF, Manuscrits, Latin 1171)
diapo 1 : http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53019388n/f1.item (BnF, Manuscrits, Latin 6912)
LIBER Conference in Munich 26-28th June 2013