The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) is one of the world's largest public and research libraries and France’s oldest heritage institution, dating back to the 14th century. Gallica, the digital library of the BnF and its partners, offers free online access to more than 5 million items in French and other languages as well, including 16 000 newspapers, journals and magazines titles, or 3,4M issues. Since 2016, Retronews, a platform dedicated to historical printed press and with a high level of editorial input, also makes available a vast online archive of French and Francophone periodicals published between 1631 and 1950. The BnF has a large experience in mass digitisation and digitisation process, especially in the field of OCR, OLR and text enrichment (named entities recognition, topic modeling). Its involvement in many European and national research projects, as well as the vastness of its collections, allows it to play a central role in the NewsEye project. The BnF will make Newseye benefit of its key position within several networks and centers of competence to both assess and carry out the sustainability of the project.
Team Biographies
Jean-Philippe Moreux
Jean-Philippe Moreux joined the BnF in 2012 as OCR and digital publishing formats expert and is now Gallica scientific advisor. In addition to being a member of the ALTO Editorial Board, he currently works on all heritage digitization programs and research projects (NLP, text and data mining, OCR, etc.) BnF participated to, as well as on the application of research results to digital libraries. Prior to that, he was an IT R&D Engineer and project manager, and then worked as a science editor and a consultant in the publishing industry. He is a Graduate in Computer Science (INSA Toulouse, 1990) and postgraduate in Software Engineering (CERAM-CNRS Sophia-Antipolis, 1991).
Sébastien Cretin
Sébastien Cretin "OCR and digital text formats expert" at the BnF since Spetember 2019. He acquired an extensive experience working as technical manager for e-books providers of important French publishers, and was Head of the mass digitization program of the "Out-of-commerce books of the 20th century" between 2015 and 2019. He is a member of the "Normes et Standards" group within the Digital Commission of the National Union of French Publishers.
Marion Ansel
Marion Ansel is Project manager and Communication Officer in the International relations delegation at the BnF since 2012. As such, she has been in charge of the BnF’s participation in the Europeana Sounds project, and former Europeana Newspapers and Europeana Awareness projects. Previously based in Brussels, she was involved in project management as a Project Assistant in EU policies in DG CONNECT where she supported the project officers on research programme implementation actions and on communication activities.
Amanda Smith
Amanda Smith works as a Project Officer within the International Relations Delegation and the Services and Networks Directorate of the BnF. She holds a Master of Arts degree in Historical Research from the University of Sheffield (UK) and a professional master’s degree in Public History from Paris-Est Créteil University (France). Her previous professional experiences include several roles in the field of cultural heritage, as well as various positions as an English teacher at the French Ministry of National Education and Paris Nanterre University.