Digitizing the Charles Cros Collection: a work in progress to enable access to a unique collection of recording and play back machines
Since 2013, the French National Library’s Audiovisual Department has initiated a research program for knowing better and promoting our Charles Cros Collection, a unique collection of more than 1.400 recording and playback machines. The program deals with two main issues: building a catalogue considering interoperability as a condition of its success, and making pictures of the machines before uploading them in a set of on-line exhibitions. These virtual displays will offer different paths, outlines and points of view into the collection, linking the machines to digital copies of audiovisual documents they could have read or recorded. After a long but fruitful phase of preparation, the first display was presented in Paris conference last year, together with the tools developed by BnF teams to produce linked open data.
My paper will introduce three new virtual displays launched since Paris conference, giving a better idea of the scope and variety of the collection: instruments of experimental phonetics used in Paris Phonetics Institute in the early 20th century to understand vocal phenomena; vintage game consoles, among them the Odyssey, the first console that could be played at home in the family circle, and teaching materials embracing all audiovisual techniques from the Pathégraphe, on which one could learn foreign languages in the 1910s, to the Thomson T07 computer that equipped most of the schools in France at the beginning of the 1980s.