The BVH in Tours: digital library of image, text and data^[1]

TEI Conference
Wien, September 30^th 2016

Sandrine Breuil, Mathieu Duboc, Guillaume Porte et Toshinori Uetani

1-1 BVH

The Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes (BVH, or Virtual Humanistic Libraries) are a research project run since 2002 at the Centre d’Études Supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours, France (CESR, or Center for Advanced Renaissance Studies) in collaboration not only with academic partners like the Humanism Section of the IRHT, the computer science team of the University of Tours or some linguistic laboratories of Tours, Lyons or Poitiers, but also with Libraries and Archives mainly from the French Centre Region.

1-2 Main goal

The objective of the BVH is clearly stated in 2003.  It has never changed since: “to develop a digital library of original documents of the Renaissance period, delivering two types of reliable digital representations, facsimile and text, closely linked together”^[2].  Fidelity to the original document has always guided our choices.  A facsimile contains in principle the entire part of the original document including binding, blank pages, end-papers, edges or back.  We describe as precisely as possible its bibliographical and codicological states in order to guarantee the authenticity of its digital version.  In the Epistemon corpus, XVI^th century French texts are transcribed directly from the original documents.  The encoding schema of our specific TEI-Renaissance guidelines is adapted to the spelling and punctuation of the XVI^th century French and the page layout of the Early Modern prints. This scrupulous fidelity to the original document makes our TEI files sometimes very complex. Continuer la lecture →