an innovative partnership between the french national library and the british library in the field of digital humanities the polonsky liber 2018 47th liber annual conference research libraries as an open science hub from strategy to action 20180704 divas part of digital humanities the french national library bnf strives to engage in public service of its heritage collections its highlevel technical resources and infrastructures its skills and knowhow in the development of digital activities and its very active policy of collaboration with other institutions in france and abroad these priorities are especially relevant in a research programme initiated by the french national library and the british library thanks to thebrpatronage of the polonsky foundation this twoandahalfyear program 20162018 aims at cataloguing digitizing and showcasing a corpus of 800 illuminated manuscripts produced in france or england between the 8th and 12th centuries the two libraries are working together to disseminate this corpus to the widest possible audience digitizing 400 mss from each library collection cataloguing and partially restoring them in addition a general audience book richly illustrated will be published by the british library a symposium will be organized at the bnf and two websites dedicated to the project will be developed the bnf is currently creating a bilingual website based on the iiif technology and the gallica infrastructure gallica marque blanche in order to collect all selected manuscripts and to allow digital comparison among them while the british library is preparing a bilingual website targeted for a general audience that will feature highlights from the most important of these manuscripts and articles commissioned by leading experts in the fieldbrthis paper aims to give an overview of the polonsky programme focusing on the main lines the expectations and the targeted outputs of the programme the digitization and restoration processes the several scientific aspects thatbrmerge different disciplines and approaches in order to gain a better understanding of those fascinating cultural objects that are the manuscripts finally the challenges concerning the iiif website and the interoperability of the metadatadivnbspdivdiv villeneuve dascq universite de lille lilliad learning center innovation charlotte denoel