Rare Books & Mss. Collections
The Library's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (RMC) includes 400,000 printed volumes, more than 70 million manuscripts, and another million photographs, paintings, prints, and other visual media. Of special interest are the French Revolution Collection and the Lafayette Collection.
Primary Sources
- ABU: la Bibliothèque Universelle(L'Association des bibliophiles Universels)
"L'accès libre au texte intégral d'oeuvres du domaine public francophone sur Internet depuis 1993." Provides access to a number of public domain French literary texts as well as several French language dictionaries. - ARTFL(American & French Research on the Treasury of the French Language).
Produced by the Dept. of Romance Languages and Literatures, Univ. of Chicago, ARTFL is a database containing the full texts of major literary works in French. - Base internationale de lettres électroniques du Moyen Age au XXe siècle (B.A.S.I.L.E.): la littérature narrative, romans, contes, nouvellespubliée sous la direction de Claude Blum. [Paris] : Champion Electronique : CNED, 2000.
CD-ROM contains electronic versions of 1000 French prose fiction texts dating from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. Texts have been authenticated by the authors wherever possible. - French Women WritersPart of the ARTFL Project, Dept. of Romance languages and Literatures, Division of the Humanities, University of Chicago. A searchable database containing works by French women authors from the 16th to the 19th century. Also contains a general bibliography of works by French women writers. Works included.
- Gallica: la bibliothèque numérique(Bibliothèque nationale de France)
Gallica is a digital library of French and francophone culture maintained by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Contains numerous electronic texts, images, maps, animation, and sound files of French and other publications in history, literature, science, philosophy, law, economics, and political science. - Textes de français ancien.The "Textes de français ancien" (TFA) database was established by the Laboratoire de français ancien (LFA, University of Ottawa), in collaboration with the ARTFL Project (University of Chicago). The original collection was composed of texts from the 12th and 13th centuries, digitized for the preparation of a lemmatized database of Old French (project in collaboration with the Institut National de la Langue Française). Middle French texts (14th and 15th centuries) have been added to this collection subsequently.
- Voltaire électronique.Ulla Kölving, general editor. Alexandria, VA : Chadwyck-Healey ; Oxford : Voltaire Foundation, c1998.
Based upon the Voltaire Foundation Oxford edition of the Complete works of Voltaire (edited by T. Besterman et al.), this database includes all of Voltaire’s literary works, searchable by keyword, title, literary form, and date of edition. Texts which have not yet been published in the Complete works are drawn either from the original sources or from the nineteenth-century Moland edition of Voltaire’s works.