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Introduction The scholarly monograph has been compared to the Hapsburg monarchy in that it seems to have been in decline forever! It was in 2002 that Stephen Greenblatt, in his role as president of the US Modern Language Association, urged his membership to recognise what he called a ‘crisis in scholarly publication’. It is easy to forget now that this crisis, as he then saw it, had nothing to do with the rise of digital technologies, e-publishing, or open access. Indeed, it puts his words in...

Professionally edited open access online encyclopaedias enable a systemic and reliable orientation within the ever-increasing amount of data and information on the Internet. Providing access to scientifically verified information, they represent an important part of the research and didactic infrastructure. This paper demonstrates the activities of Croatia’s Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography aimed at exploring the new encyclopaedic concept in the digital age. The Institute’s digital transformation is shown, which involves the digitisation and online publishing of archival editions, publishing of the permanently updated online general encyclopaedia, and the transformation of specialised encyclopedias to the encyclopaedic portals. Encyclopaedic portals could represent a new concept of encyclopaedias in the digital realm by serving as platforms for data networking and sharing, a sort of ‘junction points’ that connect diverse digital content on a specific topic. Institute’s publicly available repository of encyclopaedic knowledge enables the linking to the digital data and collections of other research and cultural institutions; therefore the collaborative projects aimed at reinforcing digital research and cultural infrastructure will be described. Thanks to the properties of the digital media and increasing connectivity, a closer collaboration Towards a New Concept of Open Access Online Encyclopaedia : A Case Study from... between professionally edited online encyclopaedias across Europe (and beyond) is enabled. This paper elaborates a range of initiatives seeking to build connections across individual European and North American national encyclopaedias, focusing on the role that Croatian encyclopaedistics plays in this endeavour.

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.

International audience; The german biography portal “Deutsche Biographie” is a joint effort of the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Bavarian State Library and supported by cultural heritage institutions to develop a historical and biographical information system for the German-speaking world. It includes digital full texts of more than 48.000 articles about persons and families of two biographical dictionaries and indices from associated institutions. We will describe our objectives in adopting state-of-the-art methods in Digital Humanities (DH): metadata modeling, text-encoding, identifying individuals and places in authority files and aggregating further biographical information from freely available, persistent, scientific and source-based websites and databases. The portal offers an entry point for historical biographical research by providing programmable web services to foster current approaches in DH like linked open data/semantic web, historical network research. computational linguistics. The potential of it lies in its coordinated biographical data management and integration. The common database is gradually enlarged in a collaborative and modular manner together with partners in Germany and Europe. We will discuss on how the collection information can be curated in order to serve and facilitate future research trends.

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.