On November 26, a presentation of the national digitization policy to the CollEx-Persée referents provided an opportunity to review the main lines of the policy, the actions underway and the programs underway.
This same week, the Digitization Working Group, led by Héloïse Marill and Laurie Aoustet, returned to work with a roadmap for the year 2020/2021 dedicated to the structuring of a shared digitization technology chain.
At the crossroads of collections and services to researchers, digitization cuts across all of CollEx-Persée’s missions and is strongly in line with the network’s logic: pooling of specific skills required for digitization projects, operational and technical support for operators, and convergence of standards and tools must serve to make collections available and develop their use by researchers.
The national digitization policy of CollEx-Persée, adopted in 2019, is therefore entirely focused on digitization for research, putting digitized and enriched corpora and collections at the service of scientific programs for their scientific exploitation.
Its main axes are :
1. Support for the digitization of corpora in connection with research projects
Two calls for projects, in 2018 and then 2019, have helped to finance ambitious projects of enriched digitization* within the network. The monitoring of projects should also allow better identification of the skills mobilized in digitization projects and facilitate their sharing.
Support for digitization projects also involves sharing and developing tools that meet open science standards. To this end, in 2021 CollEx-Persée will support the development of Numa-Hop, a tool dedicated to the management of digitization projects. A survey by the Digitization group, also conducted in 2021, will lead to recommendations for making widely available the interoperable building blocks of a solid technological chain.
2. Support for multidisciplinary programs of national scope
This axis responds to the need to build vast digital corpora exploitable for research purposes, defined in conjunction with the scientific community.
To this end, a concerted digitization program involving Persée and the plans de conservation partagée conservation plans was initiated in 2020. This program mobilizes Persée’s know-how in digitization, structuring and enrichment of scientific journals, and relies on the documentary expertise of the libraries and the networked operation of the shared conservation plans.
3. Promoting the library as a place for research and expertise
Digitization for research requires a combination of scientific, documentary and computer expertise. This is what is at stake in the residencies for researchers in libraries, which are the subject of a call for proposals open until January 10, 2021. The research work carried out on the network’s collections will prepare them for use in digitization projects and will contribute to their dissemination.
Gabrielle Richard, director of Persée