Digital libraries and innovation

Digital Libraries and Innovation


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Digital Libraries and Collections Set
coordinated by
Fabrice Papy

Digital Libraries
and Innovation

Fabrice Papy
Cyril Jakubowicz


First published 2017 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Press Ltd and Elsevier Ltd

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ISBN 978-1-78548-223-6
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Contents

Chapter 1. Digital Building of
“Information Society” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.1. “Information Society” infrastructures . . .
1.2. Improving citizenship through
digital technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.2.1. Digital libraries and technical fantasy
1.2.2. Availability and access to
digital resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1.2.3. Technological exceptions . . . . . . . .
1.3. Digital libraries and IR skills . . . . . . . .
1.4. Digital and information skills . . . . . . . .
1.5. Individualized paths in digital libraries . .

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Chapter 2. Innovations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

27

2.1. Digital libraries: a crucible for innovation
2.2. Definitions and typologies of innovation .
2.3. The innovation movement regarding
library computing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.4. Innovation regarding library interfaces . .
2.4.1. Innovation actors in library interfaces
2.4.2. Innovation through usages . . . . . . .
2.4.3. Innovation through hybridization . . .
2.4.4. Identity innovation: new features
of library interfaces and digital libraries . . .
2.4.5. Meaning innovation . . . . . . . . . . .

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Digital Libraries and Innovation

2.4.6. Desirable innovation . . . . . . . . .
2.4.7. Desired innovation . . . . . . . . . .
2.4.8. Conviction: intention (motivation)
and assiduity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
2.4.9. Appropriate innovation . . . . . . .
2.4.10. The new industrial revolution . . .

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Chapter 3. Digital Library Collaborations
Focused on Technology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

67

3.1. Collaborative models inherited from
W3C recommendations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.2. XML technologies and semantic descriptions.
3.3. OAI-PMH: unqualified Dublin Core
data production and sharing . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
3.4. Catalog FRBRization: from an obsolete
model of collaboration focused on documents
to a collaboration model focused on data . . . . . .

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Chapter 4. Re-engineering Digital
Libraries While Focusing on Usages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

99

4.1. Possible usages, actual usages . . .
4.2. Web technologies and
anthropocentric perspectives . . . . . .
4.2.1. REST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4.2.2. DOM and XSLT . . . . . . . .
4.2.3. CORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4.2.4. AJAX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
4.3. User experience and cross-cutting
Information Retrieval . . . . . . . . . . .

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Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

115

Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

135

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

157

1
Digital Building of
“Information Society”

1.1. “Information Society” infrastructures
Approximately two decades – a short time at the level of human
societies – were needed so that successive governmental action plans1
could provide substance to a political project regarding the digital
evolution of our societies. Within a few years, in the most
economically and technologically developed countries, the need for an
information transformation from human societies to tertiary
economies appeared [MAT 07, RIF 05, THE 02, PET 98, MAY 97,
HEN 96]: “Organizational changes driven by the implementation of
new relationships with information, its processing and dissemination,
1 It was in 1998 that the Programme d’Action Gouvernemental pour la Société de
l’Information (PAGSI – Governmental Action Program for the Information Society)
was launched by the Comité interministériel pour la Société de l’Information (CISI –
Inter-ministerial Committee for Information Society): “The governmental action
program entitled ‘Preparing the entry of France in Information Society’ intends to
facilitate citizen’s access to administration via the Internet, universalize the online
availability of public data, dematerialize administrative procedures, and make
administration electronically accessible. These guidelines led to a significant
development of central administrations, decentralized services and State public
institutions websites, as well as numerous initiatives presented on the site of the
Programme d’Action Gouvernemental pour la Société de l’Information (PAGSI –
Governmental Action Program for the Information Society)” – Circular of October 7,
1999 on the websites of State services and public institutions.

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Digital Libraries and Innovation

can be the matrix of new major economic regulations and of the
development of a new knowledge economy that needs to be theorized”
[PET 98, p. 341].
Knowledge, its availability and, more generally, the access to
reliable and current information in markets, which proves to be of
significant advantage for individuals, communities, companies and
countries, has become extremely competitive due to economic
globalization [DEL 12, BEN 09, UNE 05, UNE 03, OCD 04].
Beyond the substitutive dematerialization of the administrative and
institutional operating modes and, more generally, of lifestyles,
numerous observers saw these transformations as the expression of a
new paradigm; that of a “rupture society” [DOU 13, DON 09, BER
08, RIF 05] yet considered by some as utopian: “The first of these
phases would be the chaotic phase of innovation gestation, where
rhetoric takes the form of a ‘rupture utopia’. Then, an implementation
phase would follow, at the end of which the utopian reflection would
either be embodied by an experimental project, a ‘utopia-project’, or
would fail or refuse to face (technical and social) reality and would
thus get lost in a ‘utopia-delusion’” [BER 02, p. 6].
In light of the most recent digital developments, in the known
context of economic globalization, it is more a “suppletive
dematerialization”2 that the action plans, focusing on the Information
Society Technologies (ISTs)3, sought to address [ASS 07, CER 02].

2 Like the Agence de développement de l’Administration Électronique (ADAE –

Electronic Administration Development Agency) created by a Decree in 2003 within
the framework of the Electronic Administration 2004/2007 (ADELE) project. At the
end of its mission in 2007, the ADAE was integrated into the General Directorate for
State Modernization (Decree No. 2005 of December 30, 2005).
3 The European Parliament and Council of Europe prefer the term Information
Society Technologies (ISTs) to the term, more often used, Information and
Communication Technologies (ICTs). Even though they are very synonymous, the
term “IST” has the advantage of reflecting the political, economical, social, cultural,
etc. ambitions assigned to ICTs (see Recommendation of the European Parliament
and the Council of December 18, 2006 on the key skills for education and training
throughout life. Official Journal of the European Union, L394/310.


Digital Building of “Information Society”

3

During the Internet emergence period, it was all of the scientific
actors and transnational firms that committed to a surprising
collaborative dynamics4 who, in tune with achievements and devices
leading to the adhesion of millions of Internet users, provided the
“high-frequency” rate of digital technological innovations (search
engines and directories, social networks, digital documents,
broadband, development languages for the Web, etc.).
Conversely, preparatory stages for the organizational,
administrative and political foundations of an emerging “Information
Society” (technical infrastructures, content production, governance of
information systems, network security and robustness, legal
adaptation and regulation, actor training and skills, data
confidentiality, protection of privacy, sustainable development,

“digital policy”5, etc.), which were considerably less spectacular, were
implemented at a far slower pace, due to the complexity of the
architectures to be defined, the infrastructures to be developed, and the
social and cultural regulations to be foreseen. These tedious stages
took place one after the other in the background of the vivid
productions of tireless research and development from the economic
actors of electronics, IT and telecommunications, whose mediafriendly activities have made the headlines of non-specialized and
specialized media6 for many years.
Free from society, cultural, political and citizen issues with no
immediate link to the economy or market shares to be won in an

4 The World Wide Web Consortium, created in 1994, is the main actor of production
and distribution of World Web normalized technologies (HTML, XML, CSS, SSL,
DOM, RDF, HTTP, SOAP, etc.). The consortium includes, among its 440 members, a
large majority of international technological companies (see />Consortium/Member/List, seen on 02/27/2016).
5 The Service d’Enquête des Fraudes aux Technologies de l’Information (SEFTI –
Information Technology Fraud Investigation Service) was launched in February 11,
1994. It reports to the Sub-Directorate for Economic and Financial Affairs within the
Directorate of the Judicial Police of the Prefecture of Police of Paris.
6 The number of pages indexed by Google and Yahoo!, and their technological war
(engine vs. directory), the RIS IT clusters, fundraising, stock exchange listing, the
number of active users on Facebook or Twitter, etc.


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Digital Libraries and Innovation

emerging digital economy, these ICT industrial actors never had to
trouble themselves with matters such as individual liberties, digital

divide and unequal access to the products and services of this
“Information Society” in the making. The first years of Internet
propagation were accompanied by the main technological firms, with
a great deal of advertising and communication operations, aimed at a
wide audience already receptive, even familiar with, to technoscientific evolutions, [NAY 14, BEA 12, MUS 10, PRA 92, LEV 96],
advocating, on the one hand, their capacity for digital innovation and
hinting, on the other hand, at the unavoidable turmoil that such
innovations were going to create7.
The 1990s and 2000s were years of technical and scientific
enthusiasm regarding ICTs (and the Internet backbone8), used and
popularized over and over again by the mass media, which offered a
proactive story of the upcoming digital metamorphosis in society to a
wide audience [DOU 13, BEN 09, QUI 03, BAL 03, CAS 01]. This
exuberant story about a digital world in the making benefited from a
converging rhetoric – given the concerned technological fields –
between the public structures of scientific and technical research, and
industrial actors, whose research–development programs were often
interwoven9. If academic contributions could be seen as representing a
7 “Digital technology is a metamorphosis of mentalities, mobilities and means, all at
once. It causes a boom of opportunities, both from the usage point of view, but also in
their governance.” Soufron J-B. “Digital strategy: Heetch convicted, the State sticks
its head in the sand”, Lemonde.fr, March 5, 2017.
8 Internet/Web, which increased its daily presence with Web 2.0, blogosphere,
social networks, and even more individually, through applications linked to mobile
phones, etc.
9 Among the fund allocation procedures of the Agence Nationale de la Recherche
(ANR – National Research Agency), the consortium agreement aims to encourage
collaboration between one or more companies and one or more research bodies (see
Regulation on the ANR aid allocation procedures No ANR-RF-2013-1). By way of
illustration, the research platform ISIDORE, which collects, indexes and values

resource metadata produced by Humanities and Social Sciences, was partly created by
the companies Antidot and Sword SA. Those actively took part as consortium
providers, gathering teams from the Très Grand Équipement Adonis, the Center for
Scientific Communication (CNRS), the CNRS Humanities and Social Sciences
Institute, and the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.


Digital Building of “Information Society”

5

scientific neutrality in the traditional processes of scientific and
technical information dissemination (journals, seminars and books),
however, their proximity to industrial partners within the framework
of research–development collaborations altered this neutrality.
Through public–private collaborations, the results of scientific and
technical research amalgamated into innovating products and services
developed by industrial partners and contributed to their economic
activities and commercial strategies: “Obviously, ICT applications
should help to achieve major development objectives (in terms of
health, education, etc.), whatever the impact of the ICT sector on the
domestic economic performance. (…) Thus, ICTs play a double role,
both by improving the domestic economic performance, and by giving
social impetus. A double use that decision makers in terms of ICTs
and development must be aware of ” [OCD 04, p. 27].
The abundant techno-scientific production in the field of ICTs
(hardware and software engineering), along with the significant
marketing capacities of high-tech industrial actors present on every
continent, and further amplified by traditional media, for which the
birth of the “Information Society” meant great positive evolutions for

human societies subject to the economic order, drowned out the
discrete institutional rhetoric focused on citizen involvement in the
emerging digital society [BOU 09, BEN 04, ABR 96, BRO 94].
1.2. Improving citizenship through digital technology
In this new society context, the development of robust technology
to disseminate information10 ensuring that the public service met
the expectations and needs of citizens, appeared late: delivering
10 All the institutional websites must, in particular, comply with the framework
imposed by the State’s Internet Charter. The State’s Internet Charter, derived from
Circular 5574/SG of February 16, 2012, defines an Internet Départemental de l’État
(IDE – State Departmental Internet) model, aiming at ensuring the accessibility
(RGAA) and security (RGS) of institutional sites (ernisation.
gouv.fr/). Beyond simple structure and display issues, it is a question of not confusing
the user with information obtained from different services, which could prove to be
inconsistent, or even diverging and contradictory.


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Digital Libraries and Innovation

information accessible to all in a complete, fluent and consistent
manner, taking part in public debate and action, reinforcing the
transparency requirement from rulers, etc.
Thus, the National Support Point of Territorial Digital
Development (Point d’Appui National Aménagement Numérique des
Territoires – PAN ANT)11 and the last two “Digital France”12 plans
signaled the end of many other infrastructural projects, which were
demanding steps, without which no strong digital construction could
be reasonably considered at the country level.

1.2.1. Digital libraries and technical fantasy
The online availability of all the administrative procedures
(services and resources), the dissemination of public and private
content13, the digitization of cultural, educational14 and scientific15

11 />12 Digital France 2008–2012 (Digital economy development plan, http://www.
francenumerique2012.fr): 95% of the 154 operating measures were successfully
completed. The Digital France plan 2012–2020 (Achievements and future
prospects, aims
to reinforce the competitiveness of the digital economy sector.
13 The digitized collection of the National Library of France (1.5 million documents),
the French cadastral map making it possible to view 597,208 map sheets online,
and 30,000 educational resources offered by Thematic Digital Universities, etc.
14 At the educational and cultural levels, the portal toiredesarts.
culture.fr offers full access to 5,000 resources in art history of the Ministry of Culture
and Communication. This online documentary device was designed to address the
needs of the education community (school, high school) concerned with the new
teaching of art history (see Official Gazette of the Department of Education No. 32 of
August 28, 2008).
15 The digital video library (25,000 audio-visual resources) canal-u.tv, directed by the
Mission Numérique pour l’Enseignement Supérieur (MINES – Digital Mission for
Higher Education), gathers educational documents validated by the scientific councils
of Thematic Digital Universities (there are more than 30 higher education institutions
participating in the production of resources).


Digital Building of “Information Society”

7

resources, etc. resulted in important digital developments intended to
provide all citizens – beyond these visible large projects – with
significant evidence of a construction reasonably correlated to the
claims of a “Knowledge and Information Society” [MAY 97].
Large digital libraries, nowadays gathering primary information
resources designed to satisfy, if not the citizen project, at least the
political project of the “Information Society”, inherited during their
technical and conceptual development process a technical fantasy
shaped by spectacular technological proposals: search engines and
directories, social networks, e-commerce, etc. [FLI 01, BER 02].
Web technologies designed, developed and deployed by the active
industrial members of the World Wide Web Consortium, both in
respect to the publication, sharing and surrender of electronic
information [TGE 11], and the underlying sophisticated computer
architectures [PAP 14, QUI 03], influenced all digital production
animating the World Web (blogosphere, social networks, merchant
sites, etc.). Without any scientific or institutional safeguard of
technological possibilities, this influence extended as far as the
representations of designers who, in addition to the development of
technical platforms, developed a usage and digital practice fantasy for
users/Internet users: “The fantasy proposed to users is largely based
on the designers’ utopias, but [...] nevertheless underwent a number of
transformations (…), we note that the views of Information Society
practitioners, whether at the techno-scientific, economic and/or
political levels, while referring to early phantasmagorias, greatly stray
from it through a very immediate and practical perception of the
challenges linked to ICTs” [BER 02, p. 7].
These biased representations, but which are nevertheless shared by
Web practitioners within their professional communities (graphic
designers, integrators, programmers, administrators, community

manager, etc.), first guided the design of techno-documentary devices,
and then revealed their unsuitability for invisible user audiences, or
rather that were mismatched with the designer’s representations
[BOU 09]. Generally, practitioners, who are experts in their field
and convinced by the intuitive nature of the produced devices,


8

Digital Libraries and Innovation

make the mistake of thinking that beginners will replicate behaviors,
during sessions of interactions with devices, similar to their own
[CHE 16, CHE 08]. The digital breach that these devices make
tangible no longer concerns unequal access to computer equipment
[KIY 09], but technical skills and a proficiency in communication
practices essential to the use of online resources: “…our results show
that an e-administrative divide stems from both the access and
processing of information, and the computer and Internet skills and
usages. We note inequalities in the face of administration concerning
information processing. The Internet does not improve information
acquisition, since it is administration professionals and the most
educated individuals who use administrative sites” [BAC 11, p. 230].
Involved in the preparation and monitoring of large infrastructure
projects, States, who are actors in the “Information Society”
construction, arrived late in the effervescence of online information
publication, with no hope of being able to alter its trends. The very
prominent technological prerogatives (HTML, XML, CSS, Flash,
etc.), which were standardized by consensus, distributed free of charge
by international private organizations, and quickly popularized

worldwide by communities of practitioners who claimed, thanks to
their technical ability and the constant refinement of technological
tools (editors, browsers, formats, development languages, etc.), a
creative and innovating capacity, did not leave States with the
slightest chance to intervene in order to make technological evolution
compliant with the requirements regarding information site use and
access to all citizens with no exception: “But their reflection on the
digital divide led to the consideration of other factors than those of
dissemination: the factor of information use (...) Yet, in order to
measure actual use, it is no longer technology access alone that is
considered, but the access to educational, social and cultural resources
that is concerned, as it conditions the possibility of adopting
information technologies as much as it facilitates its actual use”
[IHA 09, p. 47].


Digital Building of “Information Society”

9

1.2.2. Availability and access to digital resources
In France, the Référentiel Général d’Accessibilité des
Administrations (RGAA – General Repository for Administration
Accessibility)16 tends to guarantee access for disabled persons to the
online public communication services of the State and local
authorities. This institutional framework reflects a special concern not
to further the information isolation of disabled persons, who are rarely
considered in the sophisticated graphic, interactive and ergonomic
proposals of online publication. This framework, which mainly links
access and disability, suggests that access for all is taken for granted.

Apart from the fact that this framework only concerns public
administrative structures, it does not bring about any response, or any
solution to the fact that “…the digital divide is not only the result of
unequal access to equipment and technologies. This inequality is in
fact doubled by the unequal distribution of digital literacy, in other
words the technical skills and proficiency in legitimate
communication practices (including the famous ‘netiquette’) required
by these technologies (...) despite an increasingly widespread access to
the network, the persistent illegitimacy of some forms of expression
on the Internet continues to keep the working class away from the
standards of autonomy, self-fulfillment and recognition imposed in
these new public spaces by dominant classes” [MER 16, p. 91].
Thus, the RGAA, which is mainly inspired by the Web
Accessibility Initiative (WAI), was launched in 1996 by the World
Wide Web Consortium and confirms the delay of the State which, by
adopting recommendations that the most commercial sites do not yet

16 Decree No. 2009-546 of May 14, 2009 (implementing Article 47 of the Act No.
2005-102 of February 1, 2005 on equal rights and opportunities, participation and
citizenship of disabled persons) requires an implementation of access within two years
(from the Decree publication) to the online public communication services of the
public institutions under its authority, and three years to the online public
communication services of local authorities and the public institutions under their
authority, />

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Digital Libraries and Innovation

implement17, has abandoned the thought of completely reviewing the

cognitive and socio-cultural issues of digital access [MAN 00].
It is interesting to note that the WAI directives are in fact in
contrast with the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and DOM18
(Document Object Model) evolutions supported by the same W3C. In
fact, these two recommendations increase the graphic and animation
possibilities of Web pages, on the one hand, and the modification of
page content19, on the other hand, which seem incompatible, or even
contrary to the WAI directives.
The scope of online communication services under the
responsibility of the State is also extremely wide. It concerns legal
information issued by ministries, local authorities, town halls, public
institutions, private structures with a public service delegation
(energy, transport, health, etc.), associations, etc. The diversity of the
actors is such that controlling online content access is unrealistic, and
even simply impossible.
Within these organizations, the often heterogeneous nature of the
library objects and resources to be digitally managed and distributed
determines specific technological choices for which the RGAA access
directives are not applicable, and therefore removed by designers.

17 The graphic and organizational designs of websites, in particular when they are
intended for business (e-commerce of products or services), seek to be original in
order to provide Web pages with semiotic and interactional features that will give the
site a very different identity from that of competitive sites.
18 The Document Object Model (DOM) Technical Reports, />DOM/DOMTR
19 DOM makes it possible to dynamically modify sections inside the pages (data and
presentation). It is the history mechanisms of browsers that become ineffective by
being incapable – as was expected with static Web pages or Web pages dynamically
generated in full – of tracking the local modifications of the page being viewed. In the
last CSS version, new animation possibilities appeared, even though they were little

compatible with the readability issues of visually impaired persons or with the motor
skills of the elderly.


Digital Building of “Information Society”

11

Gallica, the digital library of the National Library of France and its
partners, reflects the discrepancy between the institutional will to
ensure the accessibility/usability of the free access digital resources
and the actual accessibility of the techno-documentary devices that are
digital libraries. Thus, Gallica, accessible online since 1997, enriched
every week by thousands of new features, and nowadays offering
several thousand freely accessible documents often in image, does not
provide a page regarding accessibility20 and complies poorly with the
practical and mandatory RGAA directives.
The A criterion (minimum compliance criterion21) applied to the
issue “Does each image have a textual alternative?”, aiming at
checking that each image bearing information has a relevant textual
alternative (and possibly a detailed description), is poorly complied
with by the pages of the different online collections. The inspection
module of the Web page source code that browsers natively propose
makes it possible to check, by displaying the attribute “alt” and its
assigned value, whether it does bear the relevant replacing information
(see Figure 1.1).
height=“204”>
“Titus Manlius: [estampe] / G.P.” alt=“Titus Manlius: [estampe] / G.P.”

class=“img-thumbnail content”>
Table 1.1. Extracts from the html (<img..>) code of two pages referenced by
Gallica. In the first extract, the attribute “alt” uses the computer file name, and
in the second one, it uses that of the attribute “title”, allowing the user to
display the superimposed series of characters when the mouse passes over
the image

20 On March 4, 2016, the page gave access
to the following information: “Accessibility. This page is under construction”. On the
same date, the Europeana site did not give any access to this “accessibility” page.
21 The maximum compliance criterion is the triple “A” (AAA). The technical
framework of the RGAA 3.0 devotes 19 criteria only to the image object.


12

Digital Libraries and Innovation

Given the volumes of digital resources to be managed, the costs of
qualified staff and technical means to deploy, in addition to the
partisan rhetoric of designers as to the technological specificities of
their projects, legitimizing a kind of derogatory exception to
accessibility (as understood by institutions), mean that digital libraries,
although established on the initiative of public authorities, tend to
stray from the legal and citizen frameworks intended to prevent the
rise of unequal access to information22.
1.2.3. Technological exceptions
The constant innovation/obsolescence process in Web technologies
(HTML/XML, HTML/XHTML, HTML5/Flash, Frame/DOM,
DHTML/AJAX, WSDL/REST, XLST/Responsive Design, etc.) is an

excuse to call upon technological exception in the developments of
digital libraries. Software firms, which are often partners or providers
of these sophisticated devices, to whom the public authorities entrust
their conceptual and technological development, efficiently – from a
viewpoint focused on technology – implement the latest digital
solutions. This urgency to implement such solutions finds its
peremptory justification in an accepted rhetoric as to the improvement
of technical performances generated by the adoption of these new
technological processes, which are carefully adjusted to the
specificities of library issues and the technical availability issues of
the platforms to be developed.

22 Regarding the RGAA, sanctions for non-compliant online public communication
services (services de communication publique en ligne – SCPL) remain an insufficient
deterrent. It is above all the wronged users who should come forward by taking steps
to report any defect in the SCPLs viewed. At the end of an administrative procedure,
it is the Minister in charge of disabled persons or the prefect who shall give formal
notice to the public institution to comply with the RGAA. The institution will then
have one month to indicate the steps taken to remedy the situation. After this deadline,
the SCPL will be reported in a list electronically published by the Minister in charge
of disabled persons.


Digital Building of “Information Society”

13

Ultimately, digital libraries organized according to the
interoperability model supported by Web technologies became
“recurring exceptions” to the State’s Internet Charter. Designed

according to technological models intended to facilitate, on the one
hand, their maintenance and scalability and, on the other hand, access
from a wide variety of equipment with variable technical features,
digital libraries were built on the technological wave of the tools
promoted by the W3C members.
By abandoning these information pillars of the “Information
Society” for a dominant technological control, it is by necessity that
these sophisticated techno-documentary devices are abandoned for the
usage representations of designers [DUP 11, CIA 10, GUY 09,
CHE 08, PAV 89]. After a usage study on the Persee.fr portal,
Chauvin et al. [CHA 09] mentioned that “After 2 years of existence, a
very significant increase in the number of journals since its release
online (tripled), and several hundred thousand connections, the
success of the portal in terms of appropriation by its users remains
mixed. In fact, the difficulty in significantly seeing some consistency
in the registered users consulting the site, (generic and thematic)
forums integrated to the portal not being used, the lack of interest
from Internet users for complementary services (despite being free of
charge), features like advanced research being very little used, and
finally the difficulty in identifying visitors’ profiles and their effective
use of the portal, are so unclear that they make the tangible impact of
the portal on the research community obscure”.
This failure of online information systems to meet users’
expectations and to allow for their ability to use them tends to increase
nowadays: “The Defender of Rights notes that the dematerialization of
procedures by public services excludes many users, who are left
unable to proceed with the required steps” [DEF 16, p. 81]. This
current observation, which is the exact opposite of the digital projects

14

Digital Libraries and Innovation

launched (and funded) by public authorities23, which are, however,
aware of the risks of the digital divide within society, reflects the
logics focused on technology, and the intractable “edge effects” of
computer logics and modeling, which insidiously take precedence
over the design and implementation of computer systems.
The computer developments essentially led by a team of engineers
who are experts in their field – often unfamiliar, or even unaware of
the psychological, cognitive and ergonomic conditions under which
users will interact with the computerized information devices – will
generate non-use situations, which will fuel the exclusion dreaded by
the public initiators of the “Information Society”: “If it is true that new
technologies are supposed to be at the service of the human being, it
should be noted that they raise numerous questions and often create
obstacles to the performance of our activities, whether daily or less
frequent” [DIN 08, p. 19].
It is then that the issues regarding information failure or
dissatisfaction, which are raised during the creation of these
information devices, although they were thought of at the political
level in order to prevent them, are going to be felt by individuals with
the weakest social, cultural, educational, economic, legal, etc.
background, as a new injustice linked to “digital society”, adding up
to that of traditional society [VIT 16, KIY 09, WOL 00].

23 The “Internet Usage Delegation” (Délégation aux Usages de l’Internet – DUI),
attached to the Ministry of Education, and created by the Decree of December 8,
2003, was responsible for proposing all of the measures to extend Internet access:

training families, children and the general public to use new technologies. The
“Digital Agency” (Agence du numérique) (Decree 2015-113 of February 3, 2015),
now attached to the Director General of companies, ( />agence-du-numerique) replaced the DUI, which, while pursuing the missions initially
entrusted to the DUI, saw its activities extend within the framework of the “Digital
France” plans. The Digital Agency must help equip and support households, in
particular those lagging behind in digital use (seniors, families with low income,
persons with low education levels or unemployed, etc.).


Digital Building of “Information Society”

15

The logics focused on technology of the techno-documentary
devices that are equipping the technical infrastructure of the
“Information Society” are amplified by the competitive context of
companies, contracting authorities and usual software firm sponsors,
who demand that the applications developed comply with the
framework of the business processes specific to the company. If
interoperability is mentioned within the developments entrusted to
software firms, its aim above all is to make the technical
collaborations of distinct processes more flexible, as the latter are
generally autonomous but can circumstantially have some impact
(stock management, invoicing, accounting, customer relations, etc.,
see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1. Schematic technological interoperability of merchant sites. The
purchasing of products via the Internet creates a succession of technical
operations handled by different applications, which are part of the Information
System (IS) of the company (front-end merchant, CRM, stock management,

accounting) or outside it (IS of the banking institution, secure payment
Website). The SOAP or WSDL protocols (represented by the bi-directional
arrows) facilitate inter-application cooperation by standardizing the messages
exchanged in the XML format. The network communication architecture
transmitting the standardized messages is distributed (client–server) and
relies on the HTTPS protocol, which is widely used on the Web


16

Digital Libraries and Innovation

This functional interoperability within the company, implemented
by technological processes promoted by the W3C and its members, is
not, however, designed to take part in a global operation within a
hypothetical network in constant development, which would be
composed of companies with varied activities, and possibly
competing. Such a perspective of an upward interoperability, which
would generate a kind of information meta-system, the components of
which would be fueled by the information systems of the occasionally
linked companies, obviously seems incongruous within the context of
current economic globalization.
In fact, software firms, which deploy for their business customers
interoperable applications meeting the current technological standards
in software engineering, restrict this interoperability with the internal
processes of the company, even neutralizing any opening feasibility
for security reasons (intrusion, hacking and fraud).
Technological interoperability as deployed by software firms,
under the control of the contracting authorities that are their
customers, is then a containment interoperability, which these

computer engineering companies replicate as an implicit management
rule, common to all their clients.
By taking charge of the order of public authorities for the
development of digital libraries intended to provide the users and
citizens of the “Information Society” with resources, software firms also
introduced, at odds with the W3C24 project, this containment
interoperability in each development of the society digital project. The
large digital libraries with cultural, scientific and technical resources
(HAL, Gallica, Canal-U, Persee.fr, SUDOC, revues.org, ISIDORE,
etc.), which should operate according to the W3C generic principles of
interoperability and offer users homogeneous and immediately
identifiable interaction features, see their ergonomics and opening
surfing possibilities reduced by the computing development practices of
software firms derived from the restrictions of companies [CAR 10].

24 To lead the Web (of documents and data) to its full potential by developing
shareable protocols that will help its evolution and ensure its interoperability.


Digital Building of “Information Society”

17

To this restrictive logic driven by private organizations was added
the marketing strategies of commercial mega-sites (merchant sites,
mainstream social networks, participative sites, etc.) to convert casual
Internet users-visitors into active customers and keep them under their
sphere of influence: “Here, we are mainly making a connection with a
rationalized interaction logic based on the usage and appropriation by
companies not only of their Website, but also of community

spaces…” [DOR 10, p. 40].
It is thus that the creation of user/customer accounts on free sites
mechanically followed the footsteps of merchant sites25 regarding their
needs (order, payment and invoicing), either by creating confidential
and secure spaces (for online payment) or by using mainstream social
network features26. By registering – even outside of any business
activity – the converted Internet user gets the benefit of a few
additional services, for which they would not qualify if they remained
an anonymous visitor.
These functional logics, guided by the corporate world and digital
marketing, implemented by default by the software firm development
teams in digital libraries, blossomed with greater ease since the
interoperability control by public authorities, which made the order,
failed. While institutional directives for public communication
services were indeed defined (RGAA, State’s Internet Charter), their
application was postponed, or even suspended, in sophisticated
technological developments such as digital libraries.

25 On these free sites, the term “basket” is used to memorize some actions during
surfing, like what merchant sites offer to make a purchase. On the SUDOC portal, in
the menu bar, “my basket” allows the Internet user to memorize, during his viewing
session, the bibliographic notes they selected, and which they will then be able to
export.
26 On the Université Ouverte des Humanités (UOH – Humanities Open University)
portal, the creation of an account allows the user to benefit from space to store
favorites and send comments ( On Persee.fr,
the user account inside the portal present in the first versions was removed and
replaced by the use of accounts registered on social networks like Facebook, Google+
and Twitter.

18

Digital Libraries and Innovation

As public authorities did not intervene in these complex
developments, and with the maturation of Web technologies, they
entered into a phase of industrialization of heterogeneous, converted
or natively digital content production (text, image, video, audio, 3D,
etc.). It is a multi-faceted technological interoperability with a variable
geometry that is spreading to the detriment of citizens. Technological
interoperabilities are now available in different versions, imposed by
the designs focused on the technology of digital platforms:
encapsulated, collaborative, conditional, federated/delegated, partial,
etc., which require users to have information and digital skills, and
extrapolation capabilities for the complex operation of computer
systems, which are far from being known by all citizens [FEY 07,
RIE 06].
These skills mobilized in complex operations of Information
Retrieval (IR) have been fueled for many years by scientific work and
studies. Questioned on a regular basis with each delivery of a digital
device which is part of the building of the “Information Society”, they
are eliminated straight away: “Since the 70s, the issue of information
skills that should be acquired at school and university is recurring.
With ICT development, the notions of ‘information culture’ or
information literacy emerged. If there are different co-exiting
approaches to the concept, they agree on these points: being
‘infoliterate’ is to know how to properly find and use information”
[SIM 08, p. 23].
1.3. Digital libraries and IR skills

Widespread access to information, its production and sharing result
in unavoidable changes in the way we understand Information
Retrieval (IR). It no longer only applies to narrow sectors linked to a
greater or lesser extent of the technical and scientific information
world, but indeed concerns all the physical and moral, individual and
collective entities of our changing societies [BER 08].