Biblissima IIIF Collections of Manuscripts and Rare Books

IIIF Collections of Manuscripts and Rare Books is a cross-collections search and discovery environment for IIIF-compliant manuscripts and rare books dated before 1800. Its realization is part of the Biblissima+ programme, Observatory of Written Cultures, from Clay to Print (2021-2029). It follows Biblissima, Observatory of the written heritage of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance from the 8th to the 18th century (2012-2021).

The general approach of this platform 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 perform powerful search capabilities and facets. This data processing leverages the big cluster of authorities which forms the backbone of the interoperability of Biblissima's data. All “reconciled” entities enrich these same repositories, which are published on a dedicated platform accessible at data.biblissima.fr. This work of reconciliation, disambiguation and alignment is thus exposed and freely reusable by the original libraries or other research projects, according to Linked Open Data principles.