Established in 2003, Persée is a joint service unit (UMS3602) that brings together the ENS of Lyon, the CNRS and the University of Lyon and is supported by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MESRI). Its main mission is to promote documentary heritage for the benefit of research by ensuring its dissemination, enrichment and preservation. Persée focuses its actions around three principles:
- a comprehensive approach to documentary heritage, both as a source for research and as an object of research
- the convergence of heritage digitization and electronic publishing
- the choice of openness and sharing as instruments of visibility and for the circulation of knowledge.
Digitization and access to documentary corpora and collections are a major challenge for scientific communities. For them, it is a question of having quality content accessible in digital form, and tools for exploitation, research and appropriation that make it possible to retrieve documents and also to process them and as a result exploit the data obtained. In this context, Persée’s missions cover a workflow from the development of tools and methods to the transfer of skills and expertise through the development of digital scientific libraries. These missions are at the heart of different challenges: scientific concerns around document selection, methodological approaches to their exploitation and analysis; technological issues of innovation, research and development for value-added digitization focused on the scientific use of digital content; visibility and sustainability issues with the production, effective dissemination of enhanced digital content and long-term preservation.
Combining a complete technical platform with documentary and IT engineering skills, Persée offers a range of services based on three aims:
Enhance the value of collections of scientific publications. Persée designed, developed and maintains the Persée portal, which includes complete collections of journals, conference proceedings, series and books. This is how Persée intends to foster the value of scientific publication archives by giving priority to a precise structuring of content, advanced search and navigation tools and disseminating content openly.
Design, produce and distribute digital research libraries. Persée helps research teams in the production of corpora (digitization, structural and semantic encoding), in making these accessible, visible (website building, referencing, interoperability) and ready for their scientific exploitation (text and data mining, data visualization, indexing). The « Perséides » label identifies the various projects carried out in this area.
Provide structured data. Taken together, the digital content produced by Persée comprises a critical mass of metadata and structured data that researchers can use as a whole corpus. To promote these practices of reuse, Persée exposes its data in RDF format through its triplestore data.persee.fr.