Through its membership in the Center for Research Libraries and more specifically CIFNAL, the Library has trial access to L’Harmathèque – a large collection of French language ebooks, articles, films and audio files – through Wednesday, May 1.
Collection Content
L’Harmathèque’s multimedia platform offers ebooks, articles, videos, and audio recordings on many subjects in the humanities and social sciences. The content of the ebooks comes from a variety of French publishing imprints, including L’Harmattan, Pagala, Odin, IXE, etc. A full list of included titles can be downloaded in excel.
Currently the platform contains more than 26,000 ebooks, 17,000 articles, 400 films, and 600 audio files available. At least 2,300 new titles are added to the collection annually (the publishers estimate that around 230 ebook titles are added monthly). This impressive number of ebooks covers a wide range of subject areas in the humanities and social sciences, novels, and children’s books.
According to the description provided on the web site, article content is from journals and book chapters, although no further selection criteria are given. The videos are primarily documentaries and theatrical productions. The audio collection includes many audiobooks, in a variety of languages.
Delivery
The interface is in French. In the portals, ebooks are divided by subject into browsable bouquets. An advanced search option allows the user to narrow down the large amount of content.
Ebooks can be read either on the platform’s online reader (which requires Flash), or downloaded and read using the free Adobe Digital Editions reader. Viewing the videos requires the use of DivX and the audio content is also available through Flash.