SCRIPTISSIMA, born from the merger of two projects funded by "Investissements d'avenir", Scripta-PSL and Biblissima, focuses on the "written cultural archive of humanity" from the highest Antiquity to digital, over as wide a geographical area as possible, taking into account the diversity of languages, graphic systems and media. To date, there is no flexible structure to digitize, describe, study and match documents anywhere in the world. However, ancient collections of manuscript or printed books, works of art and objects have been scattered throughout history. Sometimes, the same document is scattered in several entities around the world. Thanks to an international meta-consortium, it is necessary to develop a scientific policy of digitisation without borders, in order to reconstitute virtually and in an agile way the historical ensembles destroyed by time and mankind. These operations must be supported by training of young researchers, as the Manusciences and Biblissima schools already do. The alliance between conservation institutions and scientific teams is essential. It is then necessary to achieve the interoperability of heterogeneous digital resources, including through Scripta-PSL and its networks all languages and graphic systems from Eurasia and a large Mediterranean basin to the Sahara. This is a major challenge, which will require the development of new repositories capable of mapping extremely heterogeneous data, built in very different cultural contexts. To process, enrich, preserve and disseminate knowledge, SCRIPTISSIMA will create a virtual centre that will be enriched as a constantly evolving ecosystem: a working environment composed of radically innovative tools for the study of primary sources. These are online tools for reading old documents in all graphic systems, for learning and assisting in translation into many languages, automated layout analysis, OCR processing of old scripts regardless of language and meaning of writing, comparison of images and palaeographic and art history descriptions and comparisons. Scriptissima is based on the semantic web and artificial intelligence, and its tools are developed by specialists in languages, writings and ancient cultures with linguists, computer scientists and neuroscientists. Such research will have other implications, e. g. on the study of literacy learning and its therapeutic consequences. A special effort will be made to visualize the data. Progress is needed on the interoperability of 3D images and videos, integrating movement and sound into the virtual restitution of artifacts and the texts they carry, bringing digital closer to the use of real objects, and working on interfaces for the visually and motor disabled. All virtual libraries, beyond scholarly research, will eventually be affected, as will teaching practices.