Sabin Americana, 1500-1926

With a name like Sabin Americana, one might not think that this resource would have much to offer historians of France. However, this new online full-text database, based on the important bibliography by Sabin,  Bibliotheca Americana – A Dictionary of Books Relating to America From its Discovery to the Present Time, includes quite a few rare materials in French.

Researchers working on French impressions of the Americas, French exploration in North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean, Atlantic studies will find the full text of primary source works. This is a Gale database, so anyone familiar with Making of the Modern World or Eighteenth Century Collections Online will be familiar with the interface. Overall, over 36,000 titles are represented, all of them fully searchable and, most importantly all with individual title records in SearchWorks and Socrates.

Access Sabin Americana either by individual title in the catalog, or by searching for the database in SearchWorks and limiting to online access.

Open-access online French journals

I hope that you are all familiar with various French full-text journal databases - at Stanford we have a subscription to CAIRN, but there are also the open access sites Persee.fr and Revues.org.

Persee is the product of the French Ministry of Education, and publishes the backfiles of selected scholarly journals. Revues.org, is an online portal supported by the CNRS, EHESS, and several French universities. It offers information about, indexing, and the full-text of recent issues of many French journals. Persee offers the backfiles, Revues.org and CAIRN offer the full text of more recent publications.

Currently, Persee is expanding its "Collection mutualization" which means that journals available on both Persee and Cairn, and both Persee and Revues.org, can be searched from either database's search engine. So, if you are searching Revues.org and find an article whose full text is in Persee (because it is in an older issue of the journal), there will be a link to the article. And vice-versa.

It all sounds more complicated than it actually is for the end user - the idea to take away is that if you want to search French scholarly journals, use these portals! They contain many of the most important journals published in France, and all offer keyword searching.

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