About Lectura
Welcome to Lectura, the portal site shared by the eight public libraries in the central cities of the Rhône-Alpes region, those of Annecy (Haute-Savoie), Bourg-en-Bresse (Ain), Chambéry (Savoie), Grenoble (Isère), Lyons (Rhône), Roanne, Saint-Étienne (Loire) and Valence (Drôme).
Lectura provides documents and a range of services to the general public. This portal allows you to access simultaneously the catalogues and data bases of eight public libraries. It also provides access to digitized documents relating to their heritage collections, a picture gallery, the regional events programme, virtual exhibitions and educational resources, plus specific services which will become available across-the-board in the future.
Lectura is the end result of a cooperative project which was set up and monitored by the network of towns known as the Conférence des villes-centres et des grandes agglomérations de Rhône-Alpes, the Rhône-Alpes Regional Council, the French State (the regional department for cultural affairs), in collaboration with the Rhône-Alpes agency for books and documentation known as ARALD. It has profited from being part of several overall plans, that are the 2000-2006 State/Region planning contract, the 2003-2007 framework convention for the network signed by the Regional Council and the eight Town Councils, and the 2000-2006 triennial convention between the State, the Region and the ARALD. The financial investment requirements have been supplied by the State and the Rhône-Alpes Regional Council. The operating costs are subsidized by the State and the Regional Council, with increasing contributions from the councils of the eight central cities. The contracting authority is the ARALD.
The project to construct a network based on the eight public libraries went through two successive phases:
- From 2000 to 2003, the first phase was subsidized by the State and the Region and consisted of carrying out a feasibility study for the portal and bringing all the libraries up to the same technical level. The latter comprised setting up Internet sites for the libraries which did not have one and the digitization of rare manuscripts for Lyons and Grenoble. The CD-Script company participated in these operations.
- From 2003 to 2006, the second phase saw the different partners agree on the objectives, the implementation plan and the legal and budgetary set-up for the future site. A steering committee made up of representatives of each institution has supervised the implementation of the project since 2005 and validated the progress made. Subsequent to a call for tenders, the W3line Company was given the job of developing the site.
The site was launched in November 2006.
A third phase, starting at the end of 2006, should see two of the initial objectives fulfilled. These are the cooperation between the libraries on the basis of Internet-related technologies and across-the board availability of services proposed to the public by the various libraries of the central cities.
The Lectura portal is an example of cultural cooperation between the eight towns and should benefit the libraries, the general public and the entire region thanks to the quality and quantity of its content and through the dissemination of its know-how. It has been designed as a competence-sharing network, and is supplied with data by the eight public libraries, which themselves will become resource sites for other establishments, in terms of services, partnerships and local organization, or with respect to new approaches related to Internet: selection of sites, digitization of manuscripts, animated images, structuring in the XML language, etc.
Furthermore, another objective of this cooperative site is not just to pool information, but to make certain local services available across the board so that the same range of services is available to everyone. This will be one of the features of a second version of Lectura, scheduled for 2008-2009.
