[14693] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
FYI France: Digital Libraries in France -- a selection
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jack Kessler)
Mon Feb 17 20:01:34 2003
Date: Sat, 15 Feb 2003 09:20:50 -0800
From: Jack Kessler <kessler@WELL.COM>
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FYI France: Digital Libraries in France -- a selection
Amid all the current France - bashing and US - bashing, it seems
incumbent upon those of us who love both countries to search for
common ground.
Among the latter are the cultural achievements of the French,
which now are benefiting so greatly from good digital information
work being conducted on both sides of the Atlantic. One result
has been the wonderful resources of the latest French Digital
Libraries -- a selection of which, all new or recently -
expanded, follows here (each entry is preceded by *) --
* Grands Sites Archéologiques
W3: http://www.culture.fr/culture/arcnat/fr/
W3: http://www.culture.fr/culture/arcnat/fr/
The treasures of French archaeology:
"De Saqqara au Musée du Louvre : Le Mastaba d'Akhethétep"
"Les Hommes Des Lacs : Vivre à Chalain et à Clairvaux il y a
5000 ans" -- in French and in English
"Les Gaulois en Provence : l'oppidum d'Entremont" -- in French
and in English
"L'Archéologie Aérienne : dans la France du Nord" -- in French
and in English
"La Grotte Chauvet - Pont - D'Arc" -- in French and in English
All in excellent multimedia -- one of the premier French sites
online...
* Bibliotheca Classica Selecta (BCS)
W3: http://193.190.251.1/Files/General/BCS/Bib.html
"Une introduction aux études classiques"
Bibliographies, ejournals, and online texts -- all designed to
introduce the French - speaking / reading student to "the Greco
- Roman world" -- Seneca in French... perhaps very useful, to
someone who figures that the English translation captures the
Latin essence... "more than one way to look at it", as Seneca
might have said...
[And this is Belgium -- but the pretense that all that is French
is located only in France increasingly needs to be dropped, in
an Internet - connected world -- particularly in "Digital
Libraries", I am finding. Users do not know and do not care what
the nationalities are of the folks running these projects, or
what the precise geographic location of the server involved
happens to be this week. And given the tortured course of recent
copyright and censorship legislation in a number of countries,
server locations may become a rapidly - shifting thing -- as the
Belgians and the French remember so well, from their long joint
history in precisely this sort of problem. JK]
* Calenda.org
W3: http://www.revues.org/calenda/
A very useful rundown of social sciences events going on in
France -- past, present, and future -- very convenient for trip
- planning.
* Athena -- Authors & Texts
W3: http://un2sg4.unige.ch/athena/html/athome.html
W3: http://un2sg4.unige.ch/athena/html/authors.html
LITERATURE
E-texts edited at ATHENA: mainly French and Swiss authors and
documents.
Books: nearly 10,000 links to books on philosophy, science,
classics, literature, history, economics, etc. Multilingual.
Several Search programs on author, title, language, words, etc.
Helvetia: Books and documents from Swiss authors (edited at
ATHENA, and links); multilingual, like Switzerland. See also
Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Français: plus de deux mille textes d'auteurs d'expression
française (édités à ATHENA, et liens vers d'autres sites).
SCIENCE
Mineralogy at ATHENA: Mineral databases regularly updated.
SEARCH programs from elements in formulas or from mineral or
type-locality's name.
Mineral Pictures: mainly pictures of uncommon species.
Links for Geoweb exploration.
ARTS
Arts & Sciences: Images and texts; a kind of interdisciplinary
encouragement to connect philosophy, science, arts, literature.
Raphael pages. Ophelia pages. Monet pages. Comet pages, with
HomePlanet Earth viewer.
Art museums and art images databases (links).
"Thousands of electronic texts, sorted by author's name!
"There are many texts here! Some are edited at ATHENA; other are
linked with other sites. When possible, several versions are
offered..."
* Voltaire Foundation / Fondation Voltaire, Oxford
W3: http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/voltaire_english.html
W3="http://www.voltaire.ox.ac.uk/voltaire_french.html
"E-texts" -- all with useful introductions --
Correspondance complète de Voltaire
Correspondance complète de Rousseau
J.-P. Brissot and the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel
(1779-1787), by Robert Darnton
Signatures clandestines et autres essais sur les contrefaçons de
Liège et de Maastricht au XVIIIe siècle, by Daniel Droixhe
Inventory to the Correspondance de Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
(1737-1814), edited by Malcolm Cook, etal.
Correspondance complète de Voltaire
Candide (English translation), translated by Theodore Besterman
Dictionnaire philosophique (English translation), translated by
Theodore Besterman
Traité sur la tolérance, text established by John Renwick
Bibliographie du dix-huitième siècle, by Dr Benoît Melançon
Index of Extended Character Entities: SGML and Unicode, ed. by
Robert McNamee
-- and there are "E-products" and "E-services" and many other
riches as well, on this site...
* BIUM / Bibliothèque Interuniversitaire de Médecine, Paris --
Medic@ / Histoire de la médecine et de l'art dentaire
W3: http://www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/histmed/medica.htm
The excellent BIUM has mounted an extraordinary site, here,
their "Collection de rééditions de textes anciens" --
"Medic@ comprend trois séries :
le Corpus des médecins de l'Antiquité, qui publie l'ensemble
des éditions majeures des auteurs anciens (Hippocrate, Galien,
Oribase) établies depuis la Renaissance jusqu'au 19ème siècle
la série Histoire des spécialités médicales, qui rassemble les
textes fondateurs de quelques disciplines (ophtalmologie,
odontologie, paléopathologie, oto-rhino-laryngologie, alchime
médicale)
la série Varia, où sont édités des ensembles cohérents de
documents sur des thématiques diverses : thèses de la faculté de
Médecine de Paris du 19ème siècle, manuscrits et publications de
Xavier Bichat, par exemple.
"Les documents numérisés sont généralement accompagnés d'une
introduction rédigée par un spécialiste de la discipline.
"En janvier 2003, Medic@ contient plus de 900 documents pour
environ 120,000 pages...
* Littérature française
A very well - arranged and well - presented sitothèque,
providing access to its subjects with added notes and indexes,
and an interesting essay: "Surfing le Dix-Septième: Accessing
French Literature on the World Wide Web", at
http://home.earthlink.net/~mmbolovan/17www.html
Littérature française du vingtième siècle / Twentieth - Century
French Literature
W3: http://home.earthlink.net/~mmbolovan/20th.html
Littérature française du dix - neuvième siècle / Nineteenth -
Century French Literature
W3: http://home.earthlink.net/~mmbolovan/19th.html
Littérature française du dix - septième siècle / Seventeenth -
Century French Literature
W3: http://home.earthlink.net/~mmbolovan/seventeenth.html
Femmes - écrivains françaises / French Women Writers
W3: http://home.earthlink.net/~mmbolovan/fww.html
Littérature enfantine française / French Children's Literature
W3: http://home.earthlink.net/~mmbolovan/fcl.html
Etudes françaises / Other French Links
W3: http://home.earthlink.net/~mmbolovan/ofl.html
* Plans de Paris / Maps of Paris
W3: http://www.paris.org/Maps/
Online maps! -- _wonderful_ maps -- including:
Plan de Truschet et Hoyau, Dit Plan de Bâle Map by Truschet and
Hoyau, Known as the Plan de Bâle circa 1552
Plan de Braun / Map by Braun - 1572
Plan de Belleforest / Map by Belleforest - 1575
Plan de Merian / Map by Merian - 1615
Plan de Paris provenance de la Dictionnaire Historique de la
Ville de Paris et ses Environs / Map of Paris from the
Dictionary of the History of the City of Paris and its
Surroundings -- 1779
Plan de Paris / Map of Paris - 1960
Plan Interactive des Musées et Monuments de Paris / Interactive
Map of Museums & Monuments in Paris
And one general note: I cannot personally imagine, yet, how
anyone is going to unify the bibliographic / meta - indexing /
etc. description of all of this... Online I actively read several
resources currently devoted to trying this, just for US etexts --
and they are a long way, still, from getting even that one done.
So how are we going to cope, I wonder, with this enormous and
rapidly growing corpus of online etexts in French and of the
French? Are the French in touch with the US indexing efforts? And
the latter with the former? And are differences being discussed,
and resolved? How about those accents aigus?...
And this is the tip of the iceberg, of course -- the French tip,
which I am so fond of reiterating is my own personal entry point
always to the much broader subject. The French, still -- current
"Iraq War" France - bashing and US - bashing fun notwithstanding
-- being most like "us" in the Anglo - American digital world.
As in geopolitics, if we can't get along with the French, in
bibliographic and etext description, how are we going to cope
with all of the Russian and Arabic and Chinese and other even
more unfamiliar etext which increasingly is out there, in the
enormous and expanding online digital information universe?
Because the customer doesn't care. The Voltaire reader does not
want to be told that she must go here to find this text, or there
to find that text -- or that the "undergraduate edition" is in
the "undergraduate library", and that only the untouchable "first
edition" is in the "rare books" library -- or that her "ebook
reader" must be used for one text, while her "laptop" must be
used for another -- or that one text handles accents aigus one
way, while another requires something different...
The Voltaire reader just wants to read "Candide". She doesn't
care what package it comes in, or who sold it to her, or how much
work everybody has put into it. She has a test on it next week
and simply needs to read and understand the words... And it
really would be nice if she could get at _all_ of the versions
currently available to her online, if choices among them might be
made, so that _she_ can be the one to make them...
For this we are going to need bibliographic description of online
etexts -- of _all_ of them.
ps. I am experimenting here, once again, with accented characters
-- for the many readers who patiently contact me requesting same,
instead of my eccentric little personal protest against the
rigidities of ASCII, "comme c,a". Anyone who experiences any sort
of problem in reading the French accents shown here, however, is
implored to contact me, again, at kessler@well.sf.ca.us, with
some sort of description of the difficulty. And, I'll send you an
un - accented or "comme c,a" version of this... This stuff still
is not obvious, to me or to anyone else, and I continue to
believe that it will not scale up to international / multi -
lingual applications as well as its enthusiasts think it will.
--oOo--
FYI France (sm)(tm) e-journal ISSN 1071 - 5916
*
| FYI France (sm)(tm) is a monthly electronic
| journal published since 1992 as a small-scale,
| personal experiment, in the creation of large-
| scale "information overload", by Jack Kessler.
/ \ Any material written by me which appears in
----- FYI France may be copied and used by anyone for
// \\ any good purpose, so long as, a) they give me
--------- credit and show my email address, and, b) it
// \\ isn't going to make them money: if it is going
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in advance, and share some of the money which they get with me.
Use of material written by others requires their permission.
FYI France archives may be found at http://infolib.berkeley.edu
(search fyifrance), or http://www.cru.fr/listes/biblio-fr@cru.fr/
(BIBLIO-FR archive), or http://listserv.uh.edu/archives/pacs-l.html
(PACS-L archive) or http://www.fyifrance.com . Suggestions,
reactions, criticisms, praise, and poison-pen letters all will be
gratefully received at kessler@well.sf.ca.us .
Copyright 1992- , by Jack Kessler,
all rights reserved except as indicated above.
--hjlm--
