French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA)

French Revolution Digital Archives

The French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA) is a multi-year collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) to produce a digital version of the key research sources of the French Revolution and make them available to the international scholarly community. The archive is based around two main resources, the Archives parlementaires and a vast corpus of images first brought together in 1989 and known as the Images de la Revolution française.


new Jean Cocteau web site

Jean Cocteau

Online since last week, Jean Cocteau unique et multiple makes available the life, works, and universe of twentieth century French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist, composer, and filmmaker Jean Cocteau (1889-1963). Drawing primarily from the Fonds patrimonial Jean Cocteau conserved in the Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Montpellier, it is theresult of a collaboration between Rirra21 (Montpellier III) / Nova Média Production / éditions L?Entretemps, with the support of the Région Languedoc-Roussillon, Université Paul-Valéry (Montpellier III), Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Montpellier, Comité Jean Cocteau, and the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent.

To date, the Berkeley Library has more than 423 works by Jean Cocteau in its physical collections, including videos and DVDs in the MRC, unique first editions in the Bancroft, and musical scores in the Jean Hargrove Music Library.


A Perec Paper Plane [repost]

A Perec Paper Plane

If summer evokes images of flight, here’s a fun repost for those far away from Berkeley this summer or simply just dreaming of travel. Originally posted on Siglio Press’ blog last year, the Georges Perec Paper Plane is a downloadable paper airplane that “as you fold it, words and phrases appear and disappear, recombine, repeat, and meanings shift as the paper transforms into something that takes flight.” It appropriates text from “A Page” published in Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (Espèces d’espaces). And if you’re curious about the literary experimentalist Georges Perec, the Library has exactly 72 works by the novelist, filmmaker, documentalist and essayist in French and in English translation.


New Library Subject Pages

Some of you may have already noticed that the three subject home pages for the Romance Language Collections have gradually taken on a new look and feel this fall. This is part of an effort in the Doe/Moffitt Libraries to transform the functionality of the former static html pages. While the content may appear the same, open-source Library à la Carte software, developed at Oregon State University enables us to quickly update the content and repurpose some of the content modules to create dynamic library course guides such as French 142AC: the Cultures of Franco-America, French 102: Writing in French, Italian 5B, and Spanish 107: Survey of Spanish Literature .

Continue reading “New Library Subject Pages”


France in America/France en Amérique

  Conceived in partnership with France’s national library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, France in America /France en Amérique is a bilingual digital library made available by the Library of Congress. It explores the history of the French presence in North America from the first decades of the 16th century to the end of the 19th century.


Bibliotheque de Toulouse Photostream


Among several historic collections, the Fonds Eugene Trutat contains more than 5,000 photographs of life in the Pyrénées. The pictures – many of which have been digitized and uploaded to the Flickr photostream – paint a unique landscape of life in the region at the beginning of the 20th Century. Other digital library collections such as Le Cri de Toulouse can be accessed directly from the Bibliothèque de Toulouse site.


Europa Film Treasures

Les Kiriki - Acrobates Japonais (France, 1917)
Les Kiriki – Acrobates japonais
(France, 1917)

An initiative of the Trésors des Archives Européennes was launched earlier this year in 5 languages and offers free streams of hard-to-find films and documentaries. Europa Film Treasures also doubles as a portal to many of the most important European film archives – a handy map links to La Cinémathèque française, Institut Lumière, Cinémathèque de la Ville de Luxembourg, and more.


Europeana goes live

 Europeana

After a brief and overwhelminingly popular launch in November, Europeana – the European digital library, museum, and archive has relaunched its current prototype, providing direct access to more than 2 million digital objects, including film material, photos, paintings, sounds, maps, manuscripts, books, newspapers, and archival papers.

Plans for Europeana Version 1.0 with links to over 6 million digital objects are in store for 2010. One of many parallel projects of The European Library, this cross-cultural and scientific heritage portal is funded by the European Commission and its member states, overseen by the EDL Foundation, and made possible through the efforts of an extensive network of partners and contributors.



Ile en Ile [web site]

Île en île contient une grande base littéraire, présentant plus de 200 auteurs francophones et insulaires avec des dossiers approfondis: photos, biographies, bibliographies et extraits de textes, souvents lus. Pour le site web « île en île », Thomas C. Spear et Sylvie Roussel-Gaucherand reçoivent «Le Trophée de la diversité culturelle» 2005.