In a digital world, research libraries are reinventing their mission, as service providers for researchers in the field of digital scholarship. In particular, they are working on providing ad hoc serv
In a digital world, research libraries are reinventing their mission, as service providers for researchers in the field of digital scholarship. In particular, they are working on providing ad hoc services at the request of research teams, ranging from documentation and collections access to dissemination and open access publishing, also including services like archiving, training, etc. However, in order to scale, generic services such as APIs and standard processesare also required.In this landscape, national libraries have to find their own place. They don’t have organic relationships with laboratories, as is the case for university libraries. But they rely on other valuable assets: massive heritage collections, a part of which are already digitized; high-level technical resources and infrastructures; longstanding skills and know-how in the development of digital activities; extensive collaborations with research bodies and other institutions.The Corpus project is an internal 4 year research project led by the national library of France (BnF), in order to define its future services to researchers by conducting agile test projects with research teams. At mid-term, the project already provides good insights on the set of services that the BnF would like to develop both virtually and physically in the library premises. These services include a dedicated website for APIs and datasets (already up and running), processes for digitization, extraction, and dissemination of new corpora on demand, workshops with researchers in different domains sharing the same methodology and tools for digital humanities, and residencies for researchers and research engineers in partnership with DH laboratories.Our presentation of the Corpus project and its findings will be illustrated with examples of actual research projects, mainly in the area of digital humanities and digitized collections, that we conducted with our partners over the past 2 years. One of these projects, called Giranium and led by the GRIPIC laboratory (CELSA, Sorbonne Université), aims at analysing heterogeneous collections around Emile de Girardin, French entrepreneur of the newspaper industry in the 19th century. This project implied all kinds of work on digital collections, including digitization, transcription of manuscript letters, OCR/OLR for newspapers, TEI encoding, text and data mining, hyperlinking, geographical data visualization, online publishing, open research... It also required from the BnF a wide array of services, including on-site access to digital and physical material and dedicated work space, thus providing an exemplary testbed for the Corpus project.
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, Jean-Philippe Moreux