# Unlocking the Past: The Biblissima Portal, a Gateway to Ancient Written Heritage in the Digital Age

Emmanuelle Morlock, Anne-Marie Turcan-Verkerk, Régis Robineau, Eduard

Frunzeanu, Kevin Bois

► To cite this version:

Emmanuelle Morlock, Anne-Marie Turcan-Verkerk, Régis Robineau, Eduard Frunzeanu, Kevin Bois. Unlocking the Past: The Biblissima Portal, a Gateway to Ancient Written Heritage in the Digital Age. DARIAH Annual Event 2025 - The Past, Dariah, Jun 2025, Göttingen (DE), Germany. 10.5281/zenodo.15855243. hal-05175560

HAL Id: hal-05175560

https://hal.science/hal-05175560v1

Submitted on 22 Jul 2025

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<figure><img src="image_1.png" /></figure>
# Unlocking the Past: The Biblissima Portal, a Gateway to Ancient Written Heritage in the Digital Age

Emmanuelle Morlock¹, **Anne-Marie Turcan-Verkerk**²,³, **Régis Robineau**²,³, Eduard Frunzeanu²,³, Kévin Bois²,³

¹CNRS, France; ²EPHE-PSL, France; ³Campus Condorcet

We are happy to be here today, to talk about a digital infrastructure created to ease access to the sources and documentation on the written heritage for the researchers and the general public.

I am Régis Robineau, deputy technical director of Biblissima+ and coordinator of its Portal team. I have prepared this presentation with Emmanuelle Morlock, deputy director in charge of the digital infrastructure, and Anne-Marie Turcan-Verkerk, director of the project.

## Trajectory

In this presentation, we will first quickly situate the Biblissima portal within the [overall project](#).

Bablissima has been funded twice in response to calls for projects aiming at supporting national-scale facilities in France, with a high degree of mutualization.

It started in 2012 with a partnership of 9 research centers and libraries focused on the history of transmission of texts from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Then another project was successful in 2021, running until June 2029.

The mention "from clay to print" shows the extended scientific scope compared to the first project, with potentially no limitations of written support or language.

## Main entry points

The Biblissima+ website features 4 main components :

* the [portal](#) itself,

* the [authority files](#) upon which the portal relies,

* a search engine called [IIIF-Collections](#), which allows to search for IIIF-compliant manuscripts and rare books across 36 digital libraries,

* and a [catalog](#) of more than 150 resources and tools that have been funded in a way or another by Biblissima among its partners since the beginning.
This presentation will focus almost only on the [Biblissima portal](https://biblissima.org), as it represents the project's inaugural achievement, it is the most widely recognized by a broad audience, and it is the cornerstone of the entire initiative.

## A research journey within the portal

Now let's dive in with a quick demo to give you a more concrete view of this central piece of the Biblissima ecosystem.

[Vidéo : Démo du portail Biblissima - 2'43]

## Beyond the traditional limits of heritage collections

Although very limited, this demo illustrated what kind of user experience the Biblissima portal provides.

We do not have time to showcase other interesting features of the portal, we would rather underline the main traditional limits that the portal seeks to overcome:

* First, the portal aims to address the issues of fragmentation and dispersal of sources. As we have seen in the demo the portal provides an efficient starting point for researcher's investigation while encouraging critical reading of the search results, without masking the shortcomings of the source databases or their contradictions.

* Secondly, it comes with a methodology for aggregating data with interoperability in mind: in a nutshell, this approach is to go further than simply aggregating catalogues and databases, it is not a simple juxtaposition of resources that the user has to tediously go through to find the information he is looking for. On the contrary, the entity pages, which consolidate all available information related to a given person, manuscript, or collection of books, merge information from several sources in a transparent and concise way.

* Third, the intensive use of IIIF standards for giving direct access to the digitized objects overcomes the traditional divide between the catalog record and images of the primary document, along with advanced IIIF features where available (such as full-text search, content indexes and annotations).

* Fourthly, one of our goals is also to go beyond the separation between primary sources and the scientific literature about them. We are still at an early stage on this front, but a proof-of-concept is in the making with the Persée platform for automated linking of references of manuscripts in the secondary literature.

Now we will see how interoperability is concretely achieved, how it works under the hood.
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Here you have a representation of the overall data integration workflow.

Starting from top left, where you have the data sources, whatever their nature or format, there are two processes running in parallel :

1. On the left, the first one leads to XML files structured according to our internal format and data model called "pivot", which are ingested into the Biblissima portal in the end.

2. On the right, the other process mostly consists in, first, extracting entities (listed in blue), and also bibliographic references that are often associated with these entities

Then comes the second step, the most valuable and time-consuming one, which is to deeply process the data in order to deduplicate, reconcile, align, and normalise this data. Basically we disambiguate entities that come as strings in the source data, and create clusters to group all the different forms of a named entity around a common unique identifier.

In the end all this work is published on a Wikibase platform at data.biblissima.fr, which is our "hub" to expose structured authority data that is openly accessible and reusable, including through web APIs, that can be used by the providers or by anyone to enrich their data.

As you can see in the diagram, we do the same kind of work on the bibliography, which is currently one of the main areas for enrichment of the portal. So far we have set up another Wikibase platform at biblio.biblissima.fr where the bibliographical data is being harmonised and enriched with links to the full text of articles or books where available.

Finally these two Wikibase instances are used to feed and update the main portal on a regular basis.

## Benefits

What are the benefits of this pragmatic approach?
1. Data producers are of course involved in the process, there are discussions going on with the Biblissima portal team, but they do not have to fundamentally change their practices, and the level of involvement necessary remains fairly low.

2. Our pivot model is very flexible, it can evolve to meet specific needs and requirements like new types of documents, new properties and relationships etc.

3. The authority hub has become a resource in its own right, with great potential for reuse by humans and by machines, in Biblissima and beyond (for entity reconciliation, for NER in texts, for collaboration with Wikidata).

## Challenges

Obviously this approach also has its drawbacks:

* updating data is certainly one of the biggest challenges, and the one on which we are most exposed to criticism, especially from specialists in the field;

* sometimes there is also an ambivalent phenomenon of “coopetition”, a kind of protectionism, a reluctance to truly collaborate, or at least a suspicion over what are the implications to share the data with us;

* not to mention the traditional dilemma between quantity and quality, which echoes the first point above;

* another challenge is also to get quoted by users as the aggregator portal where they have found the information.

To quickly sum up what has been presented, the Biblissima portal can be seen as a key example of digital innovation in access to the past. It offers unified and intuitive access to a wide range of sources — manuscripts, early printed books, inscriptions — along with their annotations and metadata, thanks to deep integration of the data, and thanks to the IIIF standards as well. Despite its challenges, recent work with AI for bibliography and the extension of its scientific scope to epigraphy confirm the robustness of its design.

## Looking Ahead

While we cannot go into much detail here, we are looking in three main directions:

* we plan to improve search capabilities of the portal and continue to expand its scientific scope, especially to epigraphy and archives;

* we also envision to develop a new infrastructure to fill one of the main gaps of the portal, i.e. the ability to search within the textual content of editions and TEI transcriptions (what we call “Biblissima-Textes”);

* another avenue is to design new outreach strategies to engage broader audiences, for instance through blog posts, podcasts or videos.

By becoming a vital reference for both researchers and the public, it dramatically boosts its chances to secure lasting funding and ensure its sustainability.