Biblissima

Available

 * Biblissima Portal: https://portail.biblissima.fr/en/
 * IIIF Collections of Manuscripts and Rare Books: https://iiif.biblissima.fr/collections/

Editors

 * Anne-Marie Turcan-Verkerk (Scientific Director)
 * Kévin Bois (developer)
 * Eduard Frunzeanu (data analysis and interoperability)
 * Régis Robineau (technical coordinator, IIIF expert)

Contact

 * team@biblissima-condorcet.fr

Description
Biblissima is an Observatory for Medieval and Renaissance Written Cultural Heritage in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. It is a data facility for historians of ancient texts that is mainly focused on the study of the circulation of books and the transmission of texts from the 8th to 18th centuries. It maintains a digital infrastructure which provides unified access to a set of digital data on medieval manuscripts, incunabula and early printed books.

Biblissima Portal
Taken from the project website (Accessed 2020-03-26):

This portal is a virtual library of libraries: discover the history of various texts and books that were written, translated, illuminated, collected and catalogued from Classical Antiquity through the 18th century.

IIIF Collections prototype
Taken from the project website (Accessed 2019-12-03):

This website provides an experimental cross-collection search and discovery environment for IIIF-compliant manuscripts and rare books dated before 1800.

The general approach of this prototype is not only to harvest and index the Manifests’ metadata as present at the source, but also to reconcile, cluster and normalise some of the metadata elements in order to enable powerful search capabilities. This data processing uses the big cluster of authorities which forms the backbone of the Biblissima portal.

This is a prototype application, it will be enhanced, updated and enriched on a regular basis.

At present the site contains metadata, and in many cases browsable images, for some 65,000 manuscripts.