Friday, August 29, 2008

French 19th-20th century primary sources

I recently received the following reference question, and thought that the question and answer would be of interest to many of you:

"... I was hoping you might be able to point me to some on-line databases containing 19th and 20th century French nonfiction texts--histories, political account, travel diaries, etc.--the kind of
stuff that would be available in the eighteenth-century collections database but for a later period? I'm also wondering if there are any on-line collections of French newspapers?"

That's a good question -

Actually, the BnF is in the process of digitizing and making available French 19th century newspapers in Gallica, its digital library. If you go to the main (old) Gallica site**: http://gallica.bnf.fr,

click on : Consultez la Presse quotidienne dans Gallica

and then you can see the journal titles available now (linked) and in the future (unlinked). Currently you can consult fascicules from the 19th and early 20th centuries of:

* Le Figaro et son supplément littéraire
* Le Temps
* La Croix
* L'Humanité
* La Presse
* Le Journal des débats
* Ouest-Eclair (éditions de Rennes, Caen et Nantes)

There are plans to digitize the following additional newspapers:

# Le Gaulois
# Le Petit Parisien et son supplément hebdomadaire
# La Lanterne et son supplément hebdomadaire
# L'Intransigeant
# La Justice
# Le Matin
# L'Aurore
# L'Action française
# Le Constitutionnel
# L'Univers
# Le Siècle
# Le Petit Journal et son supplément hebdomadaire
# Le Rappel
# Gil Blas et son supplément hebdomadaire
# L'Echo de Paris

Another place for 19th century non-fiction is the database "Making of the Modern World" which contains the titles in the Goldsmiths'-Kress microfilm collection, plus additional works. You can find this from the Databases page. This in not specifically French, but contains many French language works.

Finally, the ARTFL database main collection, FRANTEXT, contains non-fiction works in addition to literature. From the ARTFL website, you can also access digital versions of the Center for Research Libraries' pamphlets and newspapers from the Revolution of 1848.

Does anyone have any additional ideas to add?

** the BnF is currently adding material to Gallica2, which uses OCR to make its contents text-searchable. A test site is at http://gallica2.bnf.fr

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

New Renaissance databases

I'm pleased to announce that we've added two new full-text databases to our lineup from Champion electronique. These are :

Colloques, congrès et conférences sur la Renaissance européenne / Société Internationale de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur la Renaissance européenne.

Textes de la Renaissance / edited by Claude Blum

The link to both is http://www.champion-electronique.net/bases/index.php

Click on "Access to databases" then on "Éditions Champion en ligne"

These databases are actually full text searchable versions of Éditions Champion's legacy collections of the series of the same names. The interface is the same as for their other databases that we already have: Dictionnaires des 16e et 17e siècles and Corpus de la littérature narrative du Moyen Âge au 20e siècle.

You can access them from their Socrates records (search for Champion électronique), or from the Databases page on the SULAIR website (French and Italian, History, Languages sections). They are restricted to Stanford users, so if you aren't on campus be sure that you are logged on via a Stanford IP proxy address.

Friday, August 22, 2008

New Italian websites

I've come across two websites for Italian literature scholars in recent weeks. Here they are:

World of Dante - from the Institute for Advanced Technologies in the Humanities (IATH). From their press release:
"The new site includes includes the Italian text and Allen Mandelbaum’s translation of the Divine Comedy marked up in XML; an interactive timeline; a gallery of more than 600 images; an array of maps of Dante’s Italy and all three realms of the afterlife; musical recordings of the liturgical chants and hymns mentioned in Purgatory and Paradise; a searchable database; and
teaching resources and activities. The new site offers a dynamic analytical tool that we hope will accommodate a wide range of approaches to teaching Dante."


Biblioteca italiana
- From the Univ. di Roma La Sapienza. This website offers access to digital versions (both XML and HTML) of more than 1700 works of Italian literature, as well as to digital facsimiles of the works published in Laterza's series "Scrittori d'Italia".

Within the "Biblioteca" rubric, you can either access the full text of the works, or do textual research by searching for specific words or phrases (limiting by author, title, period, genre, or within the entire corpus). Select the HTML version for a format for reading.

Within the "Collezioni speciali" section, click on "Scrittori d'Italia" to gain access to the facsimiles of these editions. In this section, you cannot search for individual words, but you can go directly to specific chapters or pages.

News and resources for French and Italian studies at Stanford

Hello everyone,

I'm starting this blog to inform users of Stanford's French and Italian collections about new acquisitions and resources available to all. Almost every day I receive notice of a new journal, a new electronic resource or an interesting website, or a particularly interesting book arrives in the library. I'll try to pass on these announcements to you via this forum, so check back regularly. It may be useful to bookmark this page or add it to your RSS reader.

Please let me know that you are reading this, either by leaving a comment, or dropping me an email.
brought to you by...
Sarah Sussman, curator of French and Italian Collections