The Biblissima team is pleased to announce its main achievements over the last few months.
1. The iconography of manuscripts from French libraries in the Biblissima Portal:
The data from Initiale, the catalogue of illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages maintained by the IRHT-CNRS, can now be consulted in the Biblissima Portal [1], thus joining those of the Mandragore database (Bibliothèque nationale de France). More than
306,000 records of illuminations and decoration elements can be consulted through a common interface, representing at this stage a corpus of approx. 230,000 digital images accessible via IIIF protocols. For more details, read this Twitter feed [2]. The Portal
home page offers a
thematic entry point [3] into this large iconographic corpus.
2. Publication of a repository of quotations for ancient manuscripts and printed works:
Biblissima's shelfmarks authority file has been published on
data.biblissima.fr, the Biblissima authority data platform [4]. To date, it references nearly 200,000 shelfmarks from various catalogues and databases
from Biblissima's partners, progressively integrated into the Portal since 2017, and from the datasets aggregated into the IIIF-Collections search engine. The creation of this authority file responds to the need to unambiguously and uniformly identify manuscripts
and printed books thanks to a stable and unique URI identifier that acts as the indispensable pivot for aggregating metadata about the same object.
3. Enrichments of the IIIF-Collections of Manuscripts and Rare Books search engine:
IIIF-Collections, the search platform for digitised manuscripts and rare books, aggregates data from 17 digital libraries and allows a federated search on more than 75,000 records [5]. The last two datasets that have been processed and integrated this month
come from the Badische Landesbibliothek Karlsruhe and the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto.
We remain open to any collaboration on shared entity files in the fields covered by Biblissima, and for the integration of new resources in its Portal.
The Biblissima Team.