Biblissima Resources

Archetype (formerly known as 'The DigiPal Framework') is freely-available generalised software for the online presentation of images with structured annotations and data. Designed primarily for the palaeographical analysis of handwriting, it allows users to search for, view, and organise detailed characteristics of handwriting or other material in both verbal and visual form.

A complete document processing platform developed by Teklia. It offers optical character recognition software (printed or handwritten) to extract text, analyze the content, then classify and index data according to your own setup.

Bibale describes the history of the transmission of manuscripts and printed books and the texts they contain through the study of ancient and modern collections and their owners.

Online collaborative platform for the construction of an exhaustive index of biblical quotations and allusions in the Christian literature of Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

Index of catalogues, inventories and various lists of medieval manuscripts (8th-18th centuries).

The Bibliothèques Virtuelles Humanistes programme provides access to cultural heritage documents and brings together several types of digital resources: facsimiles of works from the Renaissance digitised in the Région Centre or at partner institutions, the textual database Epistemon which offers digital editions in XML-TEI, as well as digital editions of literary manuscripts and archival documents from the 16th century.

The BnF archives et manuscrits catalogue contains descriptions of manuscripts, drawings, and archival fonds held by several departments at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF).

Authority records of persons, organisations, works, concepts and geographical names from the BnF's General Catalogue.

This database lists fragments of Hebrew manuscripts. Jewish libraries — private collections which suffered destruction more than any other — are only partially preserved today. Traces can be found of the remains of these collections in the fragments that were reused in Christian books. Through the identification, digitisation and study of these fragments it will be possible to reconstruct a virtual European Jewish library.

The BUDÉ database gathers information on the transmission of ancient and medieval works through manuscripts and ancient printed books for a period covering the end of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, understood in a broad sense (up to the middle of the 17th century) and varying according to the country. Much of this information comes from the manual files of the Humanism section at the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes.

The Catalogue collectif de France identifies some 40 million documents held in French libraries by simultaneous interrogation of several catalogues, including those of the major French municipal libraries. In particular, it allows the localisation of manuscripts listed in the Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques françaises (CGM).

CR2I aims to bring together all the data from the Catalogues régionaux des incunables (CRI) and to enrich them with links to other online catalogues or facsimiles of incunabula.

Open online geographic information system, aiming at free access to interoperable archaeological and epigraphical data, allowing their mapping at small, medium and large scales.

This lemmatisation and morphological analysis tool for Latin texts is available for Windows, Mac OS and GNU/Linux. Lemmatise a single word or a whole text in Latin, translate the lemmas using the bundled Latin translation dictionaries, and display the corresponding syllable quantities and flexion.

Online version of Collatinus, a lemmatiser and morphological analyser for Latin texts. Use it to look up a word in 6 Latin dictionaries, to inflect a lemma, or to scan, lemmatise or analyse the morphology of a Latin text.

Collecta aims at virtually reconstructing the collection of François-Roger de Gaignières (1642-1715), which was dispersed between different repositories (Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Bodleian Library in Oxford). It is based on the complete inventory of 5,569 items (manuscripts, portfolios of drawings and engravings, prints, paintings and objects) drawn up in 1711, during the antiquarian's lifetime.

This corpus will form the basis of an interdisciplinary study and comparison of collections of Greek manuscripts in France and other European countries during the 16th and 17th centuries: physical description of the manuscripts from the selected collections, bibliography and history of the books, comparison with the information recorded in Monfaucon's Bibliotheca bibliothecarum.

Comparatio focusses on the liturgical chants found in medieval Latin manuscripts. It includes not only the text of the liturgical chants, but also the music, transcribed from manuscripts of diverse origins (France, Germany, Italy and Central Europe). This musical database aims to aid in identifying the origin of liturgical manuscripts through the study and comparison both of different versions of antiphons and responsories as well as of their textual variants.

This correspondence brings to light a great deal of information about the exchange of books between scholars and book collectors. The corpus will be expanded through the study of the most important collections of correspondence, starting with Pellicier, Peiresc, Pierre Daniel, Les Chifflet, Jacques Auguste de Thou, Charles de l’Écluse, Jacques Dalechamps, Pinelli.

The Virtual Library of Mont Saint-Michel allows the consultation of the descriptive records of manuscripts and printed books coming from the Mont Saint-Michel, and it provides access to the digital facsimiles of the books.

This digital edition will be based on the handwritten notes that were compiled for the collected inventories of manuscript libraries published in 1739. These notes, which are written in different hands, are part of the collections formerly held by the Maurists and contain a great deal of information that is not included in the original printed edition.

E-ktobe is a database on Syriac manuscripts which provides information on their physical characteristics, colophons and text, as well as manuscript annotations. It contains a great deal of information on people, places and dates concerning the making of Syriac manuscripts.

Platform for automated transcription of handwritten sources using machine learning techniques

This database indexes pre-nineteenth century catalogues for the sale of books, which are currently held in French libraries. Book sale catalogues are an essential source of information for the study of private libraries, yet they are not well-known to those who specialise in old collections of manuscripts.

Online lemmatiser of Ancient Greek texts: use it to look up terms in Ancient Greek dictionaries, check the flexion of a lemma, and lemmatise a Greek text. Eulexis is developed by Philippe Verkerk, with support from the Biblissima team.

Europeana Regia aims to reconstruct important collections of European royal manuscripts, from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, in the form of a virtual library. The project focuses on three groups of manuscripts which are currently dispersed throughout Europe: Carolingian manuscripts, manuscripts from the Library of the Louvre during the reign of Charles V and Charles VI of France, and the library of the Aragonese kings of Naples.

Application to isolate iconographical elements in a manuscript, and compare them from one manuscript to another

Research project on watermarks on paper in the medieval and modern West and on the processes of their optical shape recognition. The goal is to create a smartphone application that allows you to take a photo of a watermark, download it and obtain its description, through an image-identification system.

Gallica is the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and its partners and has been online since 1997. It contains digitised manuscripts and printed books, maps, periodicals, photos and a collection of illuminations.

Glossae Scripturae Sacrae-electronicae, a portal dedicated to the study of biblical gloss and commentary in the Middle Ages. The core component of the project is a digital edition of the Glossa ordinaria based on the Editio Princeps, an incunable printed in Strasbourg between 1480 and 1481.

This guide to cataloguing medieval and early modern bookbindings includes TEI schemas for describing the bindings, developed by the Réserve des livres rares at the BnF in cooperation with the École nationale des chartes. Available for anyone to use, this tool will be particularly useful for cultural heritage institutions whose collections include old books.

This corpus of humanist autograph manuscripts will be digitised, with a particular emphasis on Libri amicorum (books of friends) that contain numerous handwriting samples. They will then be used in the development and configuration of an image comparison tool to identify the scribes and annotators of old books.

The Greek section at the Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes is indexing the booklists of Greek libraries known to have existed before the fall of Constantinople, which are much less well-known than their Latin counterparts.

Maintained by the "Section des manuscrits enluminés" at the IRHT since 1990, this online catalogue lists the illuminated manuscripts held in French public collections (except those of the Bibliothèque nationale de France).

A collection of transcription exercises which provide students and amateurs who wish to improve their skills with the opportunity to train themselves in the practical application of palaeography: reading manuscript texts.

Description and digitization of inventories and catalogues of ecclesiastical libraries (1789-1797) in the Virtual Inventory Room of the Archives nationales (shelfmarks : F/17/1168-F/17/1179/B).

This online database was launched in 2002 and aims to build up an index of medieval texts and manuscripts in Occitan and the langues d’oïl, in addition to providing a tool for the in-depth study of hagiographical manuscripts.

Kraken is a turn-key OCR and layout analysis system optimized for historical and non-Latin script materials.

Inventory and digitisation of the "library" of Montaigne and La Boétie preserved in Bordeaux and in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region (municipal libraries of Bordeaux, Périgueux and Libourne, BU of Bordeaux III).

The "Bibliotheques françoises" project offers the online digital edition and database of the first two printed dictionaries of French authors. These libraries were published respectively in 1584 in Paris by François Grudé, sieur de La Croix du Maine and in 1585 in Lyon by Antoine Du Verdier, sieur de Vauprivas.

This research project, begun in 2007, is an important contribution to all studies on the library of the kings of France, and on the flourishing of libraries among the laity in general. The project intends to digitise and publish as a critical edition the inventory lists of the king's library. Further data on the manuscripts themselves and the texts they contain are also collected.

This iconography database contains images and descriptions of illuminated manuscripts held at the BnF (département des Manuscrits and Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal). More than 180,000 records describe approximately 6,100 manuscripts, the earliest from Ancient Egypt and the most recent of which include modern manuscripts. Each record provides extensive information on the decor, including the textual context, as well as information about the place and date of illumination, and the name of the artist or workshop when available.

This database, originally designed to describe the medical manuscripts held at the BnF (over 500), has been expanded to include Latin medical manuscripts that are held at other French libraries. The resulting data is compared to those found in other major European libraries with particular attention given to translations of Greek and Arabic medical texts into Latin in the 11th to 14th centuries.

XML Display Engine that relies on BaseX as the XML database engine, and RESTXQ and XSLT technologies. MaX is a generic and extensible tool capable of producing reading interfaces for all XML standards, and coming with a number of modules to support TEI.

Edition, analysis and digitization of the catalogs of the abbey of Saint-Bertin, as well as 577 medieval and 16th century manuscripts coming from its library, and today held at the libraries of Saint-Omer and Boulogne-sur-Mer. The digitized manuscripts and printed books are accessible on the digital library of the Communauté d'Agglomération du Pays de Saint-Omer" (CAPSO).

This database was developed for managing the manuscript reproductions that are archived at the IRHT. It also serves as a hub, by linking together the different scientific databases developed by the research teams at the IRHT.

The Order of the Minims and the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri each built up impressive libraries. The systematic analysis of the Minims' archives aids in understanding the evolution of their libraries and the circulation of texts in their historical context. As regards the Oratorians, a teaching congregation, research will focus on their libraries in Paris and elsewhere in France.

This index, begun in 2005, lists the French and Occitan translations of classic Latin and Greek texts. All the different translations and any reworkings of a given text are listed under the original title of the source text. For each translation, there are descriptions of the manuscripts and early printed books in which it can be found.

Interactive tutorial in palaeography to learn how to decipher original manuscripts, documents and inscriptions in the full range of ancient and medieval scripts and languages.

Project to digitise and catalogue all the medieval manuscripts and incunabula from the ancient library of the Dominicans of Toulouse, and to publish the archives describing the library. The data is accessible in Rosalis, the digital library of Toulouse.

This database provides information on the manuscript tradition of pre-sixteenth century Greek texts. The project began in 1971 at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto; in 1993 the Greek section at the IRHT took over its management and continues to enrich it with new data to this day.

Electronic edition of the after-death inventory of Cardinal Mazarin's library, published as part of the Thecae collection at the Presses universitaires de Caen (PUC).

Corpus of inventories and catalogues of ecclesiastical libraries of the Ancien Régime (14th-18th centuries) digitised and described in the Archives nationales' online catalogue.

The FOnds Rabelais et ses Sources En ligne project (Rabelais's Collection and its Sources Online) has several aims: reconstructing Rabelais's library, editing a small corpus of his correspondence, and digitising books that Rabelais once owned and annotated. The manuscript of his Cinquième livre will also be made available online.

Digitization of medieval manuscripts held by the Médiathèque of Chartres in order to reconstruct this lost medieval library. The documentary corpus concerns an exceptional collection of manuscripts including many Carolingian manuscripts.

The RegeCart database gives access to onomastic indexes drawn from 571 cartularies, chronicle-cartularies and bullaries (primarily from the provinces of Rheims and Sens) that were studied by the IRHT's Diplomatic section between 1942 and 1970. It also includes reproductions of the analyses of the individual acts in each cartulary and codicological descriptions of the cartularies.

Database of digitised bindings at the BnF, presenting a selection of bindings that are representative of the history of bookbinding in France. When launched in April 2013, it listed approximately 200 bindings, including many emblematic "treasures" from the collections of the Réserve des livres rares at the BnF (16th to 18th centuries).

A digital edition of the Bibliotheca belgica manuscripta by Antonius Sanderus, which contains the collected historical inventories of manuscripts in Belgium and France, published in 1641-1644.

Corpus of digital editions of sermons. The CIHAM has developed its expertise in oral traditions that have later been set down in writing through the digital edition of Jacobus de Voragine's sermons.

The data gathered from this corpus of old inventories and preserved manuscripts makes it possible to reconstruct the different collections that were once held at the Library of the Sorbonne College and trace their history. The data will be added to the Bibale database and the inventories will be published online as a digital critical edition.

The SourcEncyMe project (Sources des Encyclopédies Médiévales) focusses on the history and transmission of Greek, Arabic and Latin texts on philosophy, science, theology and history, which were included in Latin encyclopaedic compilations from the 13th century onwards.

Telma (Traitement électronique des manuscrits et des archives) provides the scientific community with access to corpora of primary sources and the finding aids necessary to manipulate and study them. It contains two kinds of corpora: resource indexes and critical editions of manuscript sources, which may or may not be linked to digital images of the documents.

Records of illustrations of Lyon prints accessible in the iconographic database of the Warburg Institute.

Electronic collection of ancient inventories of manuscripts and printed books, published by the Presses universitaires de Caen (PUC), defined and implemented within the framework of Biblissima.

Techniques pour l’Historien en Ligne : Etudes, Manuels, Exercices. This portal provides access to a number of educational tools (studies, manuals, exercises) designed to be an introduction for students and a wider audience to the different scientific methods and techniques used in historical research.

Digital medieval epigraphy project developed by the Corpus des inscriptions de la France médiévale (CIFM) team. Its goal is to publish digitally all of the epigraphic sources from the 8th to the 15th century.

The Virtual Library of Clairvaux allows the consultation of surviving manuscripts of the medieval library of Clairvaux as it was in 1472, fully digitized in color, and offers articles and self-training files aimed primarily at students and researchers.

The Virtual Library of Medieval Manuscripts allows to consult the reproduction of a large selection of manuscripts, from the Middle Ages to the 16th century.

XML editing tools and environments (EAD and TEI) to work on ancient sources, developed by the Pôle Document numérique of the MRSH (University of Caen-Normandie).