With the availability of new massive digital collections, innovative ways of exploring library data are emerging. Researchers are starting to investigate the use of powerful analysis tools that go beyond what the human eye can see, beyond what the human mind can process. Text and data mining techniques offer new opportunities for new types of research. Since a few years now, the BnF has seen its digital collections driving the interests of the early-adopters of new data management tools. These digital studies may be at the core of our users’ practice in the future; they may become instrumental in defining what a national library is. That’s why in 2016, the BnF started within its 4-year internal research programme a new project called CORPUS, aimed at designing a future service for providing access to digital corpora for researchers.

Emmanuelle Bermès is deputy director for services and networks at BnF since 2014. From 2003 to 2011, she worked at the National library of France (BnF), first in digital libraries and digital preservation, then in metadata management. From 2011 to 2014, she was in charge of multimedia and digital services at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France). She has held a number of responsibilities at international level:  within Europeana, the W3C, IFLA and the International internet preservation consortium. Among other charges, she is the coordinator for the Corpus project within the BnF.