Numistral

Numistral is the digital heritage library of the Alsatian universities and the National & Academic Library (BNU). It launched in October 2013 as the digital heritage library of the BNU. Since then, it has evolved to provide access to the digitised collections of the main Alsatian higher education and research organisations: the BNU, the University of Upper Alsace (UHA), the University of Strasbourg, and their partners.

Numistral is a collective tool aimed at promoting an exceptional body heritage documents – some dating back to Early Antiquity. It is also a platform for scientific programmes from researchers based in Alsace who study Alsatian heritage.

It is open to all, free of charge, and only documents protected under intellectual property regulations are restricted. Numistral documents are copyright free.

Numistral strategic orientations are decided by a steering committee in which the BNU, the UHA and the University of Strasbourg are represented. Its administration has been entrusted to the BNU, which is responsible for its general management and hosting. A monitoring committee composed of representatives of each member institution ensures its editorial and technological consistency. 

Deployed on a Drupal platform, the Numistral portal queries its members’ digitised documents databases:

• BNU – databases using both the Gallica Marque Blanche (GMB) tools deployed by the French National Library (BnF) and the OmekaS software solution (free software). The BNU’s partnership with the BnF dates back to 2013;
• UHA – database using the OmekaS solution;
• the University of Strasbourg – databases using the ContentDM software solution deployed by OCLC and the OmekaS solution.

Our search engine for digitised contents is Gallica’s: it directly searches documents hosted in the GMB database, and indirectly searches documents hosted on other platforms via their metadata. The consultation of the documents itself takes place on the user interface of each software solution.