Exploring Latin-american manuscripts at digital age

Résumé En

Among the written heritage public or private institutions are likely to receive, the archives of contemporary writers are by their original diversity and length, a challenge for those who are willing to receive and keep them to make them available. The archives and manuscripts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries writers attest of the big technological changes of our times: from the written pages bound by hand to the mass-produced notebooks such as “Moleskin”, from quills to biros, from typewriters to computers. Today, all these pieces of evidence from a pre-digital era keep our institutions and research teams quite busy. They toil to convert them into digital data by means of two main processes: digitalising them on the one hand, and typing and broadcasting their metadata on the other hand. The resulting sizeable data bank of these literary archives forces us –researchers- to question how data must be built, used and how we need to organise our research.Based on our experience on some archives –mainly archives of Hispanic intellectuals- and on early results among other research programs.