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International audience; Since the end of the 1980s the historiographical context has changed considerably. Over the course of the last ten years, we have reached the “digital age” and computers as well as resources available via the Internet have become indispensable tools for all researchers. Be it for the stage of documentation or for actual writing, we are now living and working in a context where historians can no longer completely refuse all IT tools. As long as there are no solid, durable, large-scale training efforts to equip all historians with the skills to use the new and old IT tools, their potential is necessarily limited. While there have been studies on “researchers” in general and also on political scientists in particular, there has, to our knowledge, been no scientific study which would allow us to reach conclusions on the use of IT tools and digital resources by French historians. It is thus difficult to reach conclusions on a larger scale and we have decided to base our analysis on our own experience in order to consider what could be the transformations of the historian’s craft in the digital age. We will thus proceed first to a series of conclusions based on our activities in mediation (teaching and blogging), before proposing a typology of the principal evolutions. We will conclude with a certain number of propositions as far as training of historians is concerned.; Dalla fine degli anni ’80, il contesto storiografico è mutato in maniera considerevole. Nel corso degli ultimi dieci anni, siamo entrati nell’“era digitale” e i computer – così come le risorse disponibili attraverso la rete Internet – sono diventati strumenti indispensabili per tutti i ricercatori. Sia per la fase di raccolta della documentazione sia per la stesura vera e propria dei resoconti, viviamo e lavoriamo oramai in un contesto in cui gli storici non possono più permettersi di rinunciare completamente a tutte le risorse informatiche; ma fino a quando non saranno profusi sforzi di formazione robusti, durevoli e ad ampio raggio per dotare tutti gli storici delle abilità necessarie ad utilizzare gli strumenti informatici vecchi e nuovi, il loro potenziale sarà necessariamente limitato. Mentre sono apparsi studi su alcuni “ricercatori” in generale e anche su scienziati politici in particolare, non esistono – a nostra conoscenza – contributi di livello scientifico che ci permettano di trarre conclusioni sull’utilizzo degli strumenti informatici e delle risorse digitali da parte degli storici francesi: così, di fronte alla difficoltà di giungere a definizioni su larga scala, abbiamo deciso di basare la presente analisi sulla nostra personale esperienza, in maniera tale da prendere in esame quali trasformazioni potrebbero intervenire nel mestiere dello storico dell’era digitale. Procederemo quindi, in prima istanza, con una serie di valutazioni fondate sulle nostre attività di mediazione (insegnamento e pratica come bloggers), prima di proporre una definizione delle principali evoluzioni; concluderemo poi con un certo numero di considerazioni a proposito di quanto la formazione dello storico sia coinvolta in questo processo.

In view of the developments of eSciences and accompanying infrastructures in German academia, the Cluster of Excellence Africa Multiple with its Digital Solutions portfolio has set the ambitious aim of establishing a digital research repository for its disciplinary heterogenous research projects ranging from economics to climate studies to linguistics, history and media studies, the “only” common ground being the studied area “Africa” and “African diasporas”. The four thematic sections that all touch upon eSciences, or put more generally, the digital transformation of the academic world and society from very different perspectives and disciplinary diversity. Be it knowledge management as a big data business model for academic services, digital neo-colonialism, the different legal aspects, problems of bias in semantic data processing, digitalization projects in Africa or digitization projects and collections built up in Europe.

International audience; The National Library Ivan Vazov in Plovdiv is the second largest library in Bulgaria. It serves asthe second national legal depository of Bulgarian printed works. In addition, it has contributedsignificantly to the preservation and the digital accessibility of the national cultural andhistorical heritage. This article offers an overview of the library’s history and currentdevelopments in the field of automation and digitization.

In the light of new digital production and dissemination practices, the scholarly publishing system has seen significant and also disruptive changes, especially in STM (science, technology and medicine) and with regard to the predominant format “journal article.” The digital transformation also holds true for those disciplines that continue to rely on the scholarly monograph as a publication format and means for reputation building, namely the Humanities and the Social Sciences with a qualitative approach (HSS). In our paper we analyse the reasons why the monograph has not yet reached its full potential in the digital paradigm, especially in the uptake of Open Access and innovative publishing options. We highlight some of the principal underlying factors for this, and suggest how especially practices, now more widespread in HSS but arising from the Digital Humanities, could play a role in moving forward the rich digitality of the scholarly monograph. peerReviewed

International audience; Once upon a time, the preservation, the study, and the digitization of books were primarily justified by utilitarian needs: to obtain a qualification, or to hold down a job — or to share ideas, or to satisfy a hedonistic need derived from the pleasure of reading. Nowadays the building of corpora and the digitization of collections could replace books by « data », the consultation of which threatens a close engagement with the linearity of text. I will comment on examples chosen from the library of Le Mans, and from my own collection, to question this apparent under valuing of reading in favour of results derived by means of tools only partly under human control.; La conservation, l’étude et la numérisation des livres ont été avant tout justifiées par un besoin social ou individuel de lecture : utilitaire, pour obtenir un diplôme et avoir un métier, pour diffuser des idées, besoin hédoniste issu du plaisir de la lecture. Actuellement la constitution des corpus et la numérisation de collections pourraient remplacer les livres par les « données », dont la consultation mettrait en danger un rapport au texte qui était avant tout « linéaire ». Des exemples pris dans les fonds de la bibliothèque du Mans ou personnels permettent d’alimenter le débat autour de ce qui apparaît comme une déqualification de la lecture, au profit de résultats obtenus grâce à un outillage plus ou moins bien maîtrisé par l’humain.

In the Republic of Serbia the idea that the digitization of cultural heritage could be used to popularize and utilize modern technologies in education was first realized in 2012. One of the results of this project was a user study. In this paper we indicate some of project’s fragments and present some of the results of the conducted research.

The ongoing EU funded project “INCEPTION – Inclusive Cultural Heritage in Europe through 3D semantic modelling” proposes a workflow aimed at the achievements of efficient 3D digitization methods, post-processing tools for an enriched semantic modelling, web-based solutions and applications to ensure a wide access to experts and non-experts. Nevertheless, the generation of high quality 3D models can still be very time-consuming and expensive, and the outcome of digital reconstructions is frequently provided in formats that are not interoperable, and therefore cannot be easily accessed. This challenge is even more crucial for complex architectures and large heritage sites, which involve a large amount of data to be acquired, managed and enriched by metadata. In order to face these challenges and to start solving the issues of the large amount of captured data and time-consuming processes in the production of 3D digital models, an Optimized Data Acquisition Protocol (DAP) has been set up. The purpose is to guide the processes of digitization of Cultural Heritage, respecting needs, requirements and specificities of cultural assets, by dealing with issues such as time-consuming processes and limited budget available for 3D documentation, accuracy of 3D models, integration of metadata and semantics into the 3D model and links with multimedia information. The DAP can be followed during the planning and performing of a 3D laser scanner survey of Cultural Heritage, and it is referred to architectural, archaeological, urban and site scales.

The rapid development of new digital tools and infrastructures in recent years and their application to a variety of disciplines has transformed how we store, access and retrieve information available to us. This has also shaped the ways how knowledge in a diverse cultural context is presented, used and re-used. The exploreAT! project builds upon not only Austrian, but also European cultural identity from the aspect of language, in particular dialects. Unlike standard languages, dialects are in times of globalization under considerable threat of diminishing, and this ultimately poses a risk to the intangible record that is language and through which a history of tangible culture is expressed. In this paper we elaborate on the possibilities digital means and the infrastructure and services of the EGI-Engage project offer in revealing and giving access to unique traditional cultural knowledge contained in a non-standard language resource on the example of the Bavarian dialects in Austria (DBÖ). Digital tools and services allow our heterogeneous corpus of data to be virtually exploited and preserved. The flexibility of the internet allow these data to become not only visible, but searchable and extractable. Through the digitization efforts, and use of European infrastructures the hidden cultural narratives within the data can be uncovered, enriched and shared for the benefit of knowledge society.

This article tackles the issue of integrating heterogeneous archival sources in one single data repository, namely the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) portal, whose aim is to support Holocaust research by providing online access to information about dispersed sources relating to the Holocaust (http://portal.ehri-project.eu). In this case, the problem at hand is to combine data coming from a network of archives in order to create an interoperable data space which can be used to search for, retrieve and disseminate content in the context of archival-based research. The scholarly purpose has specific consequences on our task. It assumes that the information made available to the researcher is as close as possible to the originating source in order to guarantee that the ensuing analysis can be deemed reliable. In the EHRI network of archives, as already observed in the case of the EU Cendari project, one cannot but face heterogeneity. The EHRI portal brings together descriptions from more than 1900 institutions. Each archive comes with a whole range of idiosyncrasies corresponding to the way it has been set up and evolved over time. Cataloging practices may also differ. Even the degree of digitization may range from the absence of a digital catalogue to the provision of a full-fledged online catalogue with all the necessary APIs for anyone to query and extract content. There is indeed a contrast here with the global endeavour at the international level to develop and promote standards for the description of archival content as a whole. Nonetheless, in a project like EHRI, standards should play a central role. They are necessary for many tasks related to the integration and exploitation of the aggregated content, namely: ● Being able to compare the content of the various sources, thus being able to develop quality-checking processes; ● Defining of an integrated repository infrastructure where the content of the various archival sources can be reliably hosted; ● Querying and re-using content in a seamless way; ● Deploying tools that have been developed independently of the specificities of the information sources, for instance in order to visualise or mine the resulting pool of information. The central aspect of the work described in this paper is the assessment of the role of the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) standard as the basis for achieving the tasks described above. We have worked out how we could develop a real strategy of defining specific customization of EAD that could be used at various stages of the process of integrating heterogeneous sources. While doing so, we have developed a methodology based on a specification and customization method inspired from the extensive experience of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) community. In the TEI framework, as we show in section 1, one has the possibility to model specific subsets or extensions of the TEI guidelines while maintaining both the technical (XML schemas) and editorial (documentation) content within a single framework. This work has led us quite far in anticipating that the method we have developed may be of a wider interest within similar environments, but also, as we believe, for the future maintenance of the EAD standard. Finally this work, successfully tested and implemented in the framework of EHRI [Riondet 2017], can be seen as part of the wider endeavour of European research infrastructures in the humanities such as CLARIN and DARIAH to provide support for researchers to integrate the use of standards in their scholarly practices. This is the reason why the general workflow studied here has been introduced as a use case in the umbrella infrastructure project PARTHENOS which aims, among other things, at disseminating information and resources about methodological and technical standards in the humanities.