BVH-Virtual Humanistic Libraries (Bibliotheques Virtuelles Humanistes)
BVH-Virtual Humanistic Libraries (Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes)
- Host: Universite François-Rabelais, Tours (France)
- Other institutions involved: CNRS, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France) Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes, CNRS
- URL: http://www.bvh.univ-tours.fr
Description: The BVH project started in 2003. It contains not only prints, but also archives and manuscripts. It is a virtual library of high-quality digitised documents, offering a selection of Renaissance books located in the libraries of the Region Centre, Paris, Poitiers, Lyons, Troyes, etc. Since 2006, it belongs to the Bibliothèque nationale de France network, and its catalog is harvested by the Gallica website. More than 200 books are already available on-line, 200 more are processed. These collaborations should carry out the digitisation of 2,000 books, with a selection of 20% transcriptions of French and Latin texts (with TEI encoding of original spellings), parallel Renaissance translations and material for linguistic analysis (dictionnaries).The main goals are text and image publishing, automatic extraction and indexing of graphic elements (initials, engravings, portraits, illustrations), lemmatisation of French Renaissance language corpora. Two new softwares are in development: Agora (Analyseur Graphique pour OuvRages Anciens = Graphic analyser for rare books) and a specific OCR for Renaissance prints, Retro (REconnaisance et TRanscription par Ordinateur = Computer transcription and recognition).
Implementation description: A manual for Renaissance encoding (TEI-Renaissance) is in progress (on-line publishing expected during the year 2008, first in French), not only for French language. Text databases such as Epistemon (http://www.cesr.univ-tours.fr/Epistemon/index.htm) will be encoded according to this manual.
Other Related Resources: A basic selection of TEI tagsets has been used, so that specific problems of spellings, variants and multi-editions could be solved, while keeping the original page layout of the book (linebreaks, pagebreaks, and so on). The Rabelais database (previously published on a server at the University of Nice, by Etienne Brunet and Marie-Luce Demonet, 1995), is going to be refreshed according to this project.
Access : Forthcoming: Nicole Dufournaud, A TEI-Renaissance Manual (Tours, BVH, 2008) Marie-Luce Demonet, 'Digitizing European Renaissance prints: a 3-year experiment on image-and-text retrieval', Kolkata, International Workshop on Digital Preservation of Heritage (IWDPH07, october 2007), Indian Statistical Institute, 2008. Marie-Luce Demonet, 'Les Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes (BVH) au Centre de la Renaissance de Tours : numériser en région pour l'Europe', in Chroniques de la BnF, March 2007 (http://www.bnf.fr/Chroniques).
Contact: Marie-Luce Demonet
37013 Tours Cedex, France.