Partnerships - Europe

TELplus: developing new services and improving access to digitised collections

Goal: Linked with TEL, TELplus will:

• scan 20 million pages with high-quality OCR and improve OCR high-quality scanning,
• develop a prototype for full-text indexation of digital libraries including multilingual and semantic research,
• develop new collaborative services for Internet users.

Pilot and partners: he National Library of Estonia, supported by the Eremo company, a consultancy in information sciences. The project brings together 31 partners, including 24 national and university libraries (Padua, Amsterdam, etc.).

Schedule: October 2007 - December 2009.

BnF involvement: The BnF is fully scanning approximately 7 million pages, taking part in several workpackages, coordinating the full-text indexation workpackage and developing a prototype for this purpose.

IMPACT (Improving Access to Text): improving optical character recognition

Goal: To improve optical character recognition (OCR) of texts, within the framework of mass digitisation, by developing new OCR tools.

Pilot and partners: The National Library of the Netherlands. The project brings together 26 partners: national, university and regional libraries, research institutes and private companies, all with well-known experience in the field of the processes and technologies of mass digitisation.

Schedule: January 2008-December 2011.

BnF involvement: The BnF contributes mainly as a supplier of digital data and authority files.

ARROW (Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works towards the EDL)

Goal: To set up a distributed infrastructure for managing rights and create the conditions for the future integration of in-copyright collections into Europeana.

This project run jointly by libraries and publishers forms, in certain aspects, an extension at European level of the collaboration between the BnF and French publishers. In particular, it aims to develop a database of orphan works and study the access to contemporary digitised works via Europeana in respect of copyright.

Pilot and partners: The Italian Publishers Association. The project brings together 16 partners, including 8 libraries (the BnF, the national libraries of Germany, Spain, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom and Slovenia and the university library of Innsbruck in Austria), publishers, e-retailers and rights management organisations.

Schedule: September 2008-February 2011.

BnF involvement: The BnF is a member of the different workpackages, notably the one concerning the business and legal models, and it coordinates the interoperability workpackage.

Europeana Regia

• Carolingian manuscripts
• manuscripts from the Library of King Charles V
• the library of the Aragon Kings of Naples

IDP-CREA (The International Dunhuang Project – Cultural Routes of Eurasia): the Silk Road online

Goal: To increase visibility to the virtual collection of the Dunhuang manuscripts (150,000 images digitised as part of the International Dunhuang Project financed by the Mellon Foundation) thanks to the use of high-performance Web tools.
In particular, it involves studying innovative ways of enhancing access to this collection (production of audio guides in different languages, chronological and geographical interfaces, a multilingual website and a database).

Pilot and partners: The British Library and 8 other partners, including the Musée Guimet, the National Library of China and the Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin.

Schedule: April 2008-July 2009, launch of the French website in April 2009.

BnF involvement: The BnF played a major role in the Workpackage concerning the development of the project's website in French on which it put its digitised documents together with the Musée Guimet.

BHL-Europe (Biodiversity Heritage Library for Europe): digitising the biodiversity

Goal: To create a digital corpus of scientific literature on biodiversity. The project aims to reinforce the scientific dimension of Europeana by providing around 25 million pages of documents kept in the European collections.

Pilot and partners: The Museum für NaturKunde in Berlin. 28 institutions in 13 European countries, including the BnF and the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle for France.

Schedule: May 2009-2012.

BnF involvement: The BnF takes part in this project as a content provider.

KEEP (Keeping Emulati on Environments Portable): preserving the long term access to digital documents

Goal: To design and produce a software platform capable of preserving the long-term access to multimedia contents (software, video games, etc.) that is independent of the commercial platforms and their constraints due to the obsolescence of software and hardware.

Pilot and partners: The project is run by 9 partners: apart from the BnF, the project leader, are involved the national libraries of the Netherlands and Germany, The Video Games Museum of Berlin, the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, two IT firms, a communication firm and the European Association of Games Developers.

Schedule: February 2009-January 2012.

BnF involvement: The BnF is coordinating the project. It is also involved in monitoring developments and carrying out legal studies for the transfer of media and reverse-engineering.

PaperTreat: assessing the mass deacidification treatments

Goal: To assess the mass deacidification treatments in order to improve the safeguarding and long-term access to acid paper documents preserved in libraries and archives.

One of the objectives is also to develop model materials, assessment and quality control criteria that will simplify the assessment of the emerging processes.

Pilot and partners: The National Library and University Library of Slovenia, associated with national and university libraries and the national archives of Slovenia, United Kingdom, Slovakia, Poland, Sweden, Netherlands and Russia.

Schedule: August 2005-August 2008.

BnF involvement: The BnF participated as an expert (on the issues of mass deacidification and assessing these processes) and end user.

Cost EnviArt: exploring the chemical interactions between cultural heritage objects and the interior environment

Goal: To set up a network of laboratories and institutions in order to explore the chemical interactions between cultural heritage objects and interior environmental conditions.

This project focuses more particularly on the chemical impact of pollutants on materials and hence it also looks into the physical and environmental aspects, the composition of materials, physical-chemical analyses, emissions and standardisation. The results obtained are exploited for preventive conservation.

Pilot and partners: TNO, a Dutch applied science research institute. The network brings together institutions and laboratories in all the EU countries.

Schedule: 2005 - 2008.

BnF involvement: The BnF worked on the volatile organic compounds emitted by the packaging or the collections themselves and their impact on healthy collections. It took part in the "Preservation" working party on the question of preventive conservation and pollutants.