Speaker
Nicolas Di Méo (University of Strasbourg)
Abstract
In recent years, Strasbourg university libraries have digitized thousands of heritage documents bought by academics between 1880 and 1950 both for teaching and research purposes. They can be consulted on Numistral, the heritage digital library common to the University of Strasbourg, the National and University Library (BNU), the University of Haute-Alsace, and the Mulhouse Municipal Library (https://www.numistral.fr). Among them, two specific corpuses have been gathered within the framework of a close cooperation between librarians and researchers.
The first corpus is composed of 1 000 archeological photographs dating back from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries. They represent various excavation sites in Italy, Greece, Turkey, etc. Librarians have digitized these documents and created descriptive metadata. Then researchers—both academics and master or PhD students recruited thanks to specific funds—have completed this information. In particular they have written short paragraphs explaining what can be seen on the pictures, how the sites represented have evolved since the photographs were taken, etc. These scientific commentaries are fully integrated in the notices, following the Dublin Core metadata standard, and provide a rich insight in the history of the collection as well as of Archeology itself.
The second corpus is composed of roughly 20 000 projection plates from the same period that were used for the teaching of Art History. They represent famous paintings or sculptures, but also less-known buildings and architectural details, especially from the Alsace region. These glass plates have been digitized and the originals stored away in suitable containers in order to be preserved. Researchers have enriched some of the notices created by librarians. They also regularly use this digital collection for pedagogical purposes, since it allows them to train their students to the description and identification of iconographic documents.
In this paper I would like to comment on those projects with the aim of showing what worked, which difficulties were encountered and how they were solved. Librarians’ and researchers’ expectations are not necessarily the same; their temporalities may also differ; yet common grounds can be found in order to preserve and reinterpret heritage collections.