Archaeological contents: from open access to open data

International audienceThe activity of the researcher takes place within a global process of development of the scientific knowledge, which relies on data sharing. He or she needs both to access existing data (sources, publications), and to distribute the material produced. Open access provides a suitable tool for reaching these two objectives. Researchers must also overcome new challenges: selecting relevant information within the huge quantity of data and ensure optimal visibility and re-usability of the data they produce. In this context, open access is not sufficient, hence the emergence of the concept of open data, which deals with technical interoperability, quality of referencing and permanence of access. Persée is a French, publically funded, program for the digitization and online publishing of printed academic journals in the field of Humanities and Social Sciences. Beyond the publication of a huge digital collection, Persée endorses the core principles of the open data movement (open access, handle/DOI, standard formats, SEO, interoperability, long term preservation). The original mission of Persée is now expanded to a new project: producing and disseminating scientific content beyond published journals. Persée will apply its knowledge to a corpus composed of heterogeneous material. A wide range of tools is being developed in order to process, disseminate, share, and allow scientific uses of these bodies of documents. Among the collections that will be processed with these new tools in 2015, two are dedicated to archaeology: • The collection 'Monuments of Cairo' is about the digital publication of the minutes and reports of the Committee for the Conservation of the Monuments of Arab Art (published from 1882 to 1953). We intend to enrich the original material with a multilingual index for toponyms and monuments. This index uses international standards and proposes to associate to each entry the several ways it is mentioned over the whole collection. • The collection relating to the excavation of 'Salamis of Cyprus' concerns the study of material and architectural remains. It aims at firmly identifying artefacts and establishing links between several resources related to these objects: catalogues, photographs, publications, index cards. These two projects will demonstrate the potential brought by open data regarding the constitution of digital collections. One of our objectives is to build a large-scale platform that will both federate data and be enriched, project after project, by a collection of tools addressing researchers' needs. Both data and tools will be fully and freely available to the community