Frequently asked questions

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This is perfectly normal because during certain periods (1795-1797 for example), several minutes were written on the same page.

For example, in the 1795-1797 notebook, the minutes for the 12^th, 13^th and 14^th assemblies were written on just one page. The same file was therefore used for these 3 assemblies but the metadata differs according to the part of the file which is described.

Apart from the three fields specifically created to describe the contents of this site (Transcripteur, President de la séance and Commentaires), the fields used come from the basic Dublin Core. Here are more details of the information contained in these fields.

Dublin Core fields
French field title	Dublin Core English title	Contents of the field
Titre	Title	Title of the document (created titles are between square brackets).
Source	Source	Volume from which the document was extracted.
Date	Date	Date of creation of the document in the normalized format YYYY-MM-DD (ISO 8601 standard).
Rédacteur	Creator	The person who wrote the document. For minutes, the creator was the meeting's secretary.
Membres presents	Contributor	The people present at the meeting (for minutes). Please note that this information is unfortunately unavailable for the majority of the minutes from 1836 onwards (with the exception of the 1886-1890 period and, in part, the 930-1932 period).
Identifiant	Identifier	A three-part identifier number: - a letter (O for original or C for copy); - a period corresponding to the volume the document was extracted from (e.g. 1795_1797_); - a three-figure number corresponding the document's place within the volume (e.g. 001).
Relation	Relation	The identifier of a resource related to the document (minutes, copy or annex).
Format	Format	- Dimensions (in centimetres) of the paper document; - Format of the scanned file.
Editeur	Publisher	An entity responsible for making the resource available.
Droits	Rights	Rights associated with the resource.
Langue	Language (hidden)	Language in which the document is written (ISO 639-1 two-letter codes). E.g. fr; en
Type	Type (hidden)	- The first type complies with the DCMI-Type vocabulary standard (text, physical object or still image); - The second type describe the type of document more precisely but not in a standardized way; - The third type corresponds to the document's type of writing.
Transcription	Description	Transcription of the text on the document. This may be completed by the transcriber's notes between square brackets.
	Coverage (not used)	This field was not considered relevant for the description of this corpus.
	Subject (not used)	This field has been left out – for the time being at least – because the subjects discussed during these meetings cannot be easily reduced to a series of keywords. In our view, the best way to find a document according to the themes discussed therein is to run a full text search in the Description field (in the case of documents which have already been transcribed, namely the originals up until 1853).

Non-Dublin Core fields
Title of the field		Content of the field
Transcripteur		The name of the person who transcribed the original document and wrote any notes that may have been added.
President de la séance		The name of the person who chaired the meeting, whatever that person's status within the Bureau des longitudes (President, vice-president, replacement).
Commentaires		Comments about the physical condition of the document, its intellectual content or its positioning in the volume from which it was extracted.

We would like to warn users of this site that the Omeka search engine may not initially appear very intuitive. It does not recognize "quotation marks" or Boolean operators.

However, certain specifications make up for the absence of Boolean operators. For example, adding fields to your search request is equivalent to using the operator AND and entering "does not contain" when you make your request is equivalent to using the operator NOT. However there is not an equivalent for the operator OR.

The advanced search function can be used to search using several crossed fields using the button "Add a field". There are three stages to be followed when running this kind of search:

- enter the field(s) you wish to use for your search;

- select one of the suggested options for each field such as contains, does not contain, is exactly, is empty, is not empty;

- type your request in the entry field.

Here is an example of a search for the minutes of meetings from 1898 which had Henri Poincaré as their president.

This module also enables users to sort documents according to the collection (one collection at a time).

This generally signifies that the search module has not taken the request into account. The cause of this is probably something having been forgotten in the procedure described above when the search was formulated.

The problem may have one of several causes (the following cases are not an exhaustive list):

- your request was not formulated according to the standards required for the search fields. In particular, this may be the case for the following search fields: Creator, Contributor, President de séance and Transcripteur (IdRef standard); Date (format YYYY-MM-DD); Language (ISO 639-1 two-letter codes)

- you selected the option "is exactly" although your search request only includes part of the information contained in the fields;

- certain fields in your search request are incompatible (for example if your search request involves two different years).

If you run a simple search using an identifier, the search engine will find all the documents which contain this identifier in any field at all. This means that you will find the document corresponding to the identifier but also all documents to which it is related (copy or annex for example).

Conversely, if you run a more advanced search by selecting the Identifier field you will only obtain the document corresponding to the identifier. On the other hand, if you search in the Relation field, you will only obtain the document(s) (copy or annex) to which it is related.

All the documents online can be downloaded. To do this, you need to access the document abstract, then the image viewer and then select a file. You should then click on the Download button at the bottom of the page on the left to download the file or just the part which was selected using the image viewer.

When downloading, you may see the following message: "No download options are available. Please turn off Two Page View for additional options". To solve this problem, you need to click on the Single Page View tab at the top right of the image viewer.