Published in paper format on a continuous tri-monthly basis since 1928, the OIV Bulletin is an essential source of information for all actors in the wine field: a century's worth of knowledge and vitivinicultural regulations in the digital age.
Dating from 1928 to 2014, more than 1000 issues of the Bulletin will be published, within which nearly 300 000 articles published in the international press will be highlighted. These constitute an exceptional library of statistics, regulations, scientific and technical work, and recommendations – a veritable testament to a century of evolution of vitiviniculture, which has become truly global.
During the presentation event, which was held in Dijon on 29 November 2016, OIV Assistant to the Director General Yann Juban praised the exemplariness of this partnership that allows the world of vine and wine to have digital access to this entire unique collection of the OIV Bulletin. It is all thanks to the initiative of the University of Bourgogne, the expertise of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (Human sciences institute for research, MSH) and the support of various partners, including the AIDV.
As indicated by one of MSH's Assistant Directors Jean Vigreux, the project – developed by this institute for research following its successful tender for the French Digital Scientific Library (Bibliothèque Scientifique Numérique, BSN) – breathes new life into these bulletins. Not only has it produced a digital version of the often-difficult-to-access paper documents, it also provides powerful research tools that make it possible to selectively search millions of pages representing almost a century of vitivinicultural knowledge and regulations.
Thanks to the digital tool, doctors, ampelographers, oenologists, legal professionals, economists, historians, geographers, linguists and wine lovers will all find useful resources in this document resource – the first examples of which were presented during this restoration event by Benjamin Bois, President of the OIV "Viticulture" Commission.
Integrated into the PANDOR portal of MSH Dijon, this multi-disciplinary resource may both be filtered by thematic indexes relating to the field in question (authors, geographical locations, designations, OIV Congresses, etc.) and searched in plain text mode. This also carries this invaluable corpus into the digital humanities and data mining age, as specified by Professor Laurent Gautier, the scientific director of this project, which comprises over 100 000 digital files equating to a total volume of 5 To of data.
This safeguarded heritage is thus available, accessible and usable. Its digitisation meets current demands for knowledge sharing and enhances vine-and-wine knowledge. Very soon the 'paper' collection thus digitised will be supplemented by the latest issues dating from 1999 to 2014.
Today the OIV is pursuing its mission to collect, process and ensure the diffusion of the most relevant information and to communicate it by publishing all scientific communications since 2014 from the World congresses of vine and wine via an online digital publishing platform, as well as still producing online reviews of the international press.
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