Persée was a co-lead of the 5th strand of activities of the Digital Scientific Library initiative (BSN5) dedicated to digitization and participated in the “Long-term Archiving” (BSN6) and “Open Scientific Publishing” (BSN4-7) working groups. In addition to developing recommendations and best practices, BSN5 has issued two calls for digitization projects for a cumulated €1.3 million and funded 33 projects in 2013 and 2014.
Persée was awarded the research infrastructure label as part of the CollEx system (collections of excellence in higher education and research). The main challenge in CollEx-Persée lies in developing documentary services that are closest to the needs of researchers. By coordinating, enriching the content offer and developing services, CollEx-Persée aims to respond to a twofold challenge: easier and more open access to research resource, and expert management of data and documents related to research programs.
CollEx-Persée took the form of an interdisciplinary scientific interest group in 2017, where a structured network of large research libraries and national STI entities is engaged (ABES, BNF, CTLES, INIST-CNRS). This Group was formed for a period of six years (2017-2022), during which time MESRI provides annual financial support. Its mission is to stimulate and support the scientific use of the vast collections of libraries and heritage institutions, whether they include printed documents, digitized corpora, digital resources, archives or research materials in general. As part of a logic of free circulation of resources, CollEx-Persée supports the development of open science by promoting the digital transformation of major heritage research libraries.
Digitization is at the heart of this system and Persée is called upon to steer a national policy in this area. The scenario chosen is that of an enriched and qualitative digitization at the service of research, focussing on advanced document processing.