PLUME: the EPFL Library is putting its heritage collections online!
CC BY-NC-SA EPFL Library
The EPFL Library has just launched PLUME, a digital library of old documents illustrating the fields of history and philosophy of science. Thousands of images of 15th, 16th and 17th century works can be viewed and downloaded freely.
The EPFL Library has a collection of precious works consisting of some 600 titles published between the 15th and 19th centuries. This collection highlights, through its humanistic perspective, the relationship between man and scientific progress. PLUME allows readers to discover and appropriate the richness of this heritage collection, which stands out for its multilingualism, the scope and variety of its scientific subjects as well as its iconographic richness.
The EPFL Library has focused on reading comfort, offering its users the possibility of carrying out full-text searches using transcriptions obtained by optical character recognition (OCR). Navigation in the structures is facilitated by the presence of dynamic tables of contents and bookmarks. Creating an account gives the user access to advanced features, such as a collaborative annotation module to comment and enrich documents. PLUME offers its visitors a high-quality viewing and visualization experience with images that can be downloaded in high definition thanks to a tool that allows them to print, download and share documents. The advanced search allows you to target several fields in the records describing scanned documents, summaries and captions, or full text.
Virtual exhibitions will be regularly offered on the platform, thus facilitating the discovery of digitised documents. Hence, the first exhibition on display highlights the incunabula held by the EPFL Library, printed in Venice in 1497 and 1499, a rare and well-preserved work, composed of two texts by Boethius, in French better known as Boèce.
In order to promote the reuse of images and texts, all these digital reproductions of works that have fallen into the public domain are freely made available under the “Public Domain Mark” license, an initiative of the global organization Creative Commons. They may be freely reused for scientific, private, non-commercial and commercial purposes. The EPFL Library intends to give new life to these old documents and allow their wide distribution, the main objective of the EPFL Library being to qualitatively complement the digital heritage already accessible online.
Some 100 remarkable documents from the Library's valuable collection are being digitized during 2019. Intended to be enriched, PLUME will provide access to a unique scientific heritage, whose interest is undeniable for the research community.