En Mai 2014, Les Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes se sont vues décernées le prix Succeed, soutenu par l’Union Européenne et par Impact Centre of Competence, qui récompensait « la mise en œuvre réussie d’un programme de numérisation exploitant les nouvelles technologies et les travaux de recherche en matière de numérisation des documents historiques ». Nous vous proposons ici, pour mémoire, la lecture du dossier complet soumis au comité des Succeed Awards.

Nomination summary

Development of text and image processing for digital libraries: the Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes project and the digitization of Renaissance documents

Abstract

The BVH (Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes: Virtual Humanistic Libraries) is a research program devoted to the digitization and electronic publication of original source documents from the Renaissance period. Since 2003, its website has published digital facsimiles, selected Early Modern imprints (1450-1650) mainly from regional collections, and transcriptions of French texts of the same period, encoded according to the XML-TEI standard. Particular attention is paid to achieving great accuracy in the bibliographical description as regards the true states of originals and the closest correspondence between two distinct corpora, facsimile and text, linked by several levels of metadata in the main catalogue. The BVH team works in close collaboration with researchers from the Computer Science Laboratory of Tours (LI-Tours) to develop new technologies in the fields of image processing and pattern recognition. Open source software for layout analysis and text transcriptions, AGORA and RETRO, enables us to perform automatic extraction of graphic components from digitized books, and thus to build up specialized databases of iconographic and typographical material. As a member of the TEI consortium, we actively contribute to the development of a specialised schema for the transcription of Renaissance documents. Each step of processing and every component developed at the BVH is also intended for use by the whole digital community, creating a model for the digital library of the future.

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