Abstract
The PRET19 project aims to carry out a comprehensive analysis of the nineteenth-century loan registers of several Parisian university libraries. These historical documents provide invaluable insights into the circulation of books and the intellectual engagement of the academic community during a transformative period. By reconstructing the relationships and trends between borrowers, the project offers a unique perspective on the intellectual landscape of Parisian universities. In this first phase, the registers come from three different university libraries and exhibit a great diversity in layout, handwriting and content, which poses significant challenges for data processing. To address these challenges, we developed a document processing workflow that effectively combines automatic handwritten text recognition (HTR) with manual processing and validation. In addition, we provide a detailed description of the database, which is designed to comprehensively model the information extracted from the registries, ensuring that the data is structured in a way that adequately responds to anticipated research requests. Once completed, the processed data will be from winter 2024 accessible via a dedicated website, providing a comprehensive digital resource for historical research.
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Notes
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By “view”, we mean a non-blank-page.
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See the lecture on borrowing and borrowers of mathematics by N. Verber and V. Rebolledo-Dhuin at the SFHST congress, 19 April 2023: https://hal.science/hal-04452449.
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At the following adress:https://pret19.bis-sorbonne.fr/, see too 6.2.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the GIS CollEx-Persée for their financial support. The GIS CollEx-Persée, under the auspices of the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research, and Innovation (MESRI), has been instrumental in enhancing the accessibility of heritage documents for scientific research through a national network of library cooperation established in 2017.
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6 Appendices
6 Appendices
1.1 6.1 Data model detailled
Presentation of the data model used in the project, detailing the relational structure among various entities associated with historical library loan registers. Key entities such as Prêt (Loan), Registre (Register), Vue (View), Exemplaire(s) (Copy(ies)), Œuvre (Work), Personne (Individual), Collectivité (Community), Localisation (Location), and Qualité (Profession) are interconnected to represent both source-derived information and enriched metadata.
1.2 6.2 Structure of the website
The website (currently under construction, in private mode, end due to go public in winter 2024), includes static pages (documentation) and database query pages.
The first two tabs (Accueil, Projet) present information on the project, the corpus concerned and the context in which the data was created. The 3rd, 4th, 5th an 6th (Personnes, Collectivités, Transactions, Sources) are used to query the database. The “visitor” can search via facets and export the results in CSV or JSON formats, for example. The website’s ergonomics – wich owes much to the Scripta Manent projectFootnote 12, also produced under Heurist – feature pop-ups that allow you to navigate from a search in one or more related entities, without losing legibility. So, in the PRET19 project, pop-ups are used to display the sources (original register pages) in Mirador, along with the records in the database. Finally, the last tab (Documentation) - a static page - provides documentation on lending in each of the libraries throughout the 19th century: regulations, background information and statistics on the type of borrower according to origin (Faculty of Science or Literature), status (professor or student), etc.
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Périssier, L., Rebolledo-Dhuin, V., Petiot, MT., Schneider, Y., Kermorvant, C. (2024). PRET19: Automatic Recognition and Indexing of Handwritten Loan Registers from 19th Century Parisian Universities. In: Antonacopoulos, A., et al. Linking Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries. TPDL 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 15177. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-72437-4_21
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