Camille Renard and Yohann Schatt, engineering students at Polytech Montpellier, have just completed an internship as part of the project, led by the International Union of Speleology, to create a global digital library on Karst and the underground environment.
The first partners of this project are, in addition to the UIS and its commissions, the Italian Speleological Society (SSI), the Belgian speleological organizations (UBS, Maison de la Speleologie, Spéléo J), the SCNAT through the scientific commission of the Swiss Speleological Society and the Wikicaves association, which organized these courses and participated in their financing. Thank you all.
Camille completed her internship in Namur with Nathalie Gouffiol, librarian at the Maison de la Spéléologie. She developed a fully functional OAI-PMH server that allowed Nathalie to retrieve analyses for articles from the journal Regards and integrate them into her database.
To achieve this, Camille relied on the OAI standard as well as the recommendations provided by the Bibliothèque Nationale Française (BNF). She paid particular attention to ensuring that responses were quick and that it was easy to retrieve the desired data.
The server is accessible at oai.grottocenter.org
Yohann completed his internship in Bologna with Luca Pisani, head of the Anelli Library.
He developed a Z39-50 server, which corresponds to an old bibliographic data exchange protocol still widely used by some documentary software. Working with this old standard was a real challenge since the exchanges are not carried out via the HTTP protocol as is customary today, but rather via FTP. The application is written in Perl, and it took a lot of ingenuity to limit server load...and the cost of the service.
The server can be accessed at z3950.grottocenter.org/
These services need to access the data stored in the Grottocenter database. To do this, they developed the APIs they needed, which are now in place, functional, and fully documented.
grottocenter.org/ui/api1/
These servers are now accessible to everyone. Camille and Yohann have created documentation explaining how to use them.
https://wiki.grottocenter.org/wiki/GrottoCenter:En/OAI_and_Z39.50_servers
This result is already of very high quality and demonstrates Camille and Yohann's technical mastery. However, for a service to be used, simply implementing it is not enough; it is also necessary to be attentive to all the issues surrounding the project.
Thus, they had to communicate their work, the possibilities offered, and the prospects to the leaders of the Belgian and Italian Speleology Federations, as well as to the Bibliography and IT Commissions and the UIS Bureau.
Thanks to Yohann, the BBS is now an internationally recognized library and registered under the reference FR-740335301 BERNEX-BBS/SA.
Camille worked with Nathalie Gouffiol and Loran Haesen to contact all the speleological organizations in Belgium to request their agreement to archive their publications under a free license. Today, 13 organizations have signed an archiving authorization for around twenty publications (one authorization under CC-BY-NC-SA license, the others under CC-BY license).
Camille has developed a protocol for digitizing documents that have not yet been digitized. Nathalie is taking charge of this digitization, and 12 collections are available, ready to be integrated into the BBS on Grottocenter.
https://wiki.grottocenter.org/wiki/GrottoCenter:Fr/Numeriser_des_documents
For databases to be able to exchange data automatically, they must be under compatible licenses. This is the case since the databases of Grottocenter, the Maison de la Speleologie de Namur and the Anelli Library are under ODbL license.
Making BBS data accessible on Grottocenter is ideal, but it is essential that this data be of high quality. Historical BBS data was imported into Grottocenter five years ago; it consisted mainly of article analyses. To make this data fully usable, work had already been done to link these articles to their journals and the journals to their collections.
But it was necessary to format the journal names. Yohann created a Python script that was used to format the journal names for the 2,000 collections currently present in Grottocenter.
We also needed the information attached to a collection to be reflected in the journals and articles attached to that collection. To do this, Camille created an application that allows for updating information regarding the publisher, language, license, and archiving authorization. This application has been used on about a hundred collections and will be used regularly so that the license choices and archiving authorization provided are applied to all documents in a collection.
It also seemed necessary that analyses should no longer be carried out solely by volunteers around the world, but that AI should be used to provide automated analyses.
Camille created an AI server that will generate metadata from a PDF document that will be associated with it.
Yohann, for his part, has been working to ensure that you can use this server from the BBS on Grottocenter.
His first task was to ensure that the document you are creating can automatically retrieve all existing data. So, if you create a new journal and indicate that it is part of a collection (for example, you create the journal Spélé'Oc No. 163 and indicate that it is part of the Spélé'Oc Collection), your document will be directly associated with the publisher, language, license, and archiving authorization that were determined by the document's publisher.
All this remarkable work was made possible thanks to Benjamin Soufflet, who ensured the technical monitoring of the developments throughout the internship, and to Vincent Marsegerra, who set up the technical infrastructure.
Much has been achieved thanks to the dedication, diligence, commitment, and extensive skills of Camille Renard and Yohann Schatt. Many thanks to both of them.
The project to create a global digital library on karst and the underground environment is now well underway. What are the next steps?
Thanks to funding from the SCNat provided by the scientific committee of the Swiss Speleological Society, a new search engine will be implemented on Grottocenter. It will be more powerful and allow for much more detailed searches.
We plan to ask a group of students from Polytech Montpellier to develop the AI service based on the infrastructure set up by Camille and Yohann. This will involve producing all the metadata associated with a document, but also producing an analysis for each article and associating these articles with cavities and their Grottocenter record.
Following the meeting of the UIS Bibliography Committee, the steering team, chaired by Jean-Marc Mattlet and including Anamaria Häuselmann and myself, was joined by Luca Pisani.
The UIS Bibliography Committee has undertaken to relaunch cooperation between UIS documentation centers.
Work is also underway to develop the way documents are associated with subjects, based on the nomenclature used by the Anelli Library.
Ce travail vous intéresse ? Vous souhaitez participer au projet ? Vous êtes d’accord pour archiver des documents et les rendre librement et durablement accessibles ?
Je vous invite à me contacter pour en parler
Are you interested in this work? Would you like to participate in the project? Would you agree to archive documents and make them freely and permanently accessible?
I invite you to contact me to discuss this.
