[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
FYIFrance: French Libraries Online (Selected), and BNdF news (pt.3/3)
- Subject: FYIFrance: French Libraries Online (Selected), and BNdF news (pt.3/3)
- From: Jack Kessler <kessler@WELL.SF.CA.US>
- Date: Thu, 15 Dec 1994 18:01:33 -0800
- Message-ID: <"8V5rw2.0.qo8.0aCCn"@sul2>
- Sender: Rare Books and Special Collections Forum <EXLIBRIS@RUTVM1.BITNET>
FYIFrance: French Libraries Online (Selected), and BNdF news (pt.3/3)
(continuation: French Libraries Online, December 15, 1994)
B) Fulltext
Fulltext French may be reached and read online now, in addition to the
bibliographic citations and pointers traditionally offered by online
libraries. A small selection of what is available in materials of
interest to French scholars follows:
1) anonymous ftp sites (online text archives)
ftp.inria.fr INRIA/Inst.Nat.de Rech.en Informatique et Automatique
zenon.inria.fr INRIA in Sophia Antipolis
ftp.cicb.fr Univ. Rennes1 ("gopher" in French!)
ftp.sunet.se /pub/etext/ota/french// contains Molie`re's _Don Juan_
fulltext (Oxford Text Archive version) and Queneau's
_Exercices du style_ fulltext (OTA version)
epas.utoronto.ca /pub/cch/french// contains Molie`re's _Don Juan_
fulltext (Oxford Text Archive version) and a French
wordlist in ascii
ftp.cnam.fr "Association des Bibliophiles Universels" files,
including fulltext (sgml marked - up?) of texts by St.
Augustine, Plutarch, Jules Verne, Th. Moreux, and E.
Dubreucq, and other things relevant to fulltext.
ftp.ircam.fr IRCAM / Institut de Recherche et Coordination
Acoustique/Musique, Centre Pompidou, Paris
ftp.ens.fr Ecole Normale Supe'rieure
2) gophers (interactive index plus archiving)
CIRIL Centre Interuniv.de Ressources Informatiques de Lorraine (Nancy)
<gopher.ciril.fr>
CITI Centre Interuniv.de Traitement de l'Information (Lille)
<gopher.citilille.fr>
Cite' Colle'giale (Ontario, Canada) <gopher.lacitec.on.ca>
CITI2 Universite Rene Descartes (Paris) <gopher.citi2.fr>
CNUSC Centre National Univ.Sud de Calcul (Montpellier) <gopher.cnusc.fr>
CRIHAN Centre de Ressources Informatiques de Haute-Normandie (Rouen)
<gopher.crihan.fr>
EMBNET Bioinformation Resource <coli.polytechnique.fr> (not strictly
a "non - hi - tech - scientific" resource, but one possessing
one of the better tongue - in - cheek electronic addresses)
ENST Ec.Nat.Sup.des Te'le'communications (Paris) <gopher.enst.fr>
Ecole Normale Supe'rieure (Paris) <gopher.ens.fr>
Ecole Polytechnique Fe'de'rale de Lausanne (Suisse) <gopher.epfl.ch>
French Embassy, Washington D.C. <iep.univ-lyon2.fr>
Genethon (Human Genome Research Center, Paris) <gopher.genethon.fr>
Institut d'Etudes Politiques (Lyon) <iep.univ-lyon2.fr>
IMAG Institut d'Informatique et de Mathe'matiques Applique'es de
Grenoble <gopher.imag.fr>
INRIA Inst.Nat.de la Rech.en Informatique et Automatique
<gopher.inria.fr>
INRIA/inria-graphlib : a Computer Graphics service of INRIA
<gopher.inria.fr 71>
Institut Pasteur (Paris) <gopher.pasteur.fr>
IRISA Institut de Recherche en Informatique et Syste`mes Ale'atoires
(Rennes) <gopher.irisa.fr>
Ministe`re de la culture et de la francophonie (St. Quentin en Yvelines)
<cyr.culture.fr>
UREC Unite' Reseaux du CNRS (Paris) <gopher.urec.fr> (the CNRS' network)
USHS Univ. des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg) <ushs.u-strasbg.fr>
Univ.Jean Monnet, CIT (St-Etienne) <lepsie.univ-st-etienne.fr>
Univ.Jean Monnet, CRITeR (St-Etienne) <gopher.univ-st-etienne.fr>
Univ.de Lyon I <gopher.univ-lyon1.fr>
Univ.de Nice - Sophia Antipolis <gopher.unice.fr>
Univ.de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour <gopher.univ-pau.fr>
Univ.de Rennes I <gopher.univ-rennes1.fr>
Univ.de Savoie (Chambe'ry) <gopher.univ-savoie.fr>
Univ.de Valenciennes <gopher.univ-valenciennes.fr>
Univ.s P. & M. Curie - D. Diderot (Paris) <gopher.jussieu.fr>
Univ.de Montreal, Litte'ratures (Que'bec, Canada)
<gopher.litteratures.Umontreal.ca 7070> (GOPHER LITTERATURES is a
relatively recent effort to establish a truly comprehensive gopher
devoted to online humanities resources in French. It has an
ambitious structure, not yet filled, but at least a promising
effort to follow for anyone interested in online humanities.)
gopher.grenet.fr -- Grenoble - net, maintained at the CICG / Centre
Interuniversitaire de Calcul de Grenoble, which gives you a
software package entitled "G.R.A.C.E (Gestion du Reseau
Automatise' de Catalogues En-ligne)", and a "help" feature
wonderfully - entitled, for a "help" feature, "B.I.P.E.D.
(Bulletin d'Information Pour Etudiants en De'tresse)". See
particularly the following, in path 8.Catalogues de
Bibliothe`ques (OPAC) et Autres Serveurs Documentaire../:
1.Catalogues des Bibliothe`ques de la Region Grenobloise/,
and 2.Catalogues des Bibliothe`ques Franc,aises/
3) Fulltext archives
There are many interesting and frustrating issues associated with
fulltext archiving, among them issues of copyright, democratic access
to texts, and markup. This last currently is the most controversial
fulltext issue on the nets: archives exist which have no markup
whatsoever -- volunteer contributors merely type in the texts -- and
there are archives with full SGML / Standard Generalized Markup
Language encoding -- enabling textual analyses which some never will
use but which is indispensable to others. Proponents of both approaches
are fierce in their advocacy, and they fight a lot online.
Online fulltext appears to be an inevitable trend, however, whatever
are to be the niceties which accompany it eventually. (There is talk of
texts presented with more than just SGML, after all: multimedia, and
"interactive text", using techniques like Internet Relay Chat and
Virtual Reality -- people now are working on a VRML / Virtual Reality
Markup Language -- are waiting in the wings.) The trend is propelled by
both the increasing popularity of the networks, and the increasingly
untenable finances of the print publishing industry. One way or
another, print publishing quickly, albeit reluctantly, is "going online".
a) The Oxford Text Archive
One of the largest and most rigorous online fulltext general archives
still is the Oxford Text Archive, assembled and maintained at that
university's computing center by Lou Bernard. At the moment the OTA
contains over 50 French fulltexts, from Sartre to Froissart to the
Chanson de Roland. References to the OTA, with its informational files,
may be found online easily at several sites using gopher's veronica
index, and OTA holdings are cataloged on the online bibliographic
service RLIN. The OTA ftp archive adress is ota.ox.ac.uk .
b) Georgetown
A comprehensive effort to keep track of the many thousands of local
online fulltext projects currently being pursued on isolated computers
all over the world is that of Georgetown University's CPET / Catalog of
Projects in Electronic Text. There are many gopher references to CPET.
The CPET telnet address is guvax3.acc.georgetown.edu , login CPET .
c) FRANTEXT
FRANTEXT is an online database of 3241 texts, taken from 2330 works of
French literature dating from the 16th century, including a large
group of non - literary works from the 19th and 20th centuries. The
corpus was assembled for the purpose of compiling word - occurrences --
there are 183 million of them -- for French dictionary research.
The database is administered by the Tre'sor Ge'ne'ral des Langues et
Parlers Franc,ais, 27, r.Damesme, 75013 Paris, telephone 45.80.36.00 or
Mme. Evelyne Martin at 45.80.77.09, fax 45.80.79.26. This is a division
of the INALF, the Institut National de la Langue Franc,aise, a unit of
the CNRS. The FRANTEXT database software is STELLA -- Syste`me de
Textes En Ligne en Libre Acce`s -- and has its critics and defenders.
An enthusiastic proponent of STELLA - searching may be found in:
Jacques Lemarignier, "Le point de vue d'un interrogateur sur FRANTEXT:
FRANTEXT a` la Bibliothe`que Publique d'Information", in _Les banques
de donne'es litte'raires, comparatistes et francophones_, edited by
Alain Vuillemin, Limoges: Presses de l'Universite' de Limoges et du
Limousin, 1993, ISBN 2910016-17-X.
d) ARTFL
In North America, FRANTEXT is available -- with an entirely different
interface and "PhiloLogic" client software -- under the name of "ARTFL /
project for American and french Research on the treasury of the French
Lanuguage". ARTFL offers many new and exciting things as part of its
joint U.of Chicago / CNRS effort, including online analytical tools, and
databases of: Provenc,al poetry, Segond's French and other Multilingual
Bibles, and Jean Nicot's _Thresor de la langue franc,aise_ (1606).
Imaging experiments are under way to mount: Diderot's _Encyclope'die_, 9
editions of the _Dictionnaire de l'Acade'mie Franc,aise_, Montaigne (and
Dante) editions and variants, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, and the Plan
Turgot (1739). See Mark Olson, director: email mark@gide.uchicago.edu,
telephone 312-702-8488. ARTFL is at http://tuna.uchicago.edu or
gopher://uchicago.edu/11/uscholarly/artfland .
C) Discussion
The best -- most manageable, disciplined, up - to - date -- method for
getting and staying current with French networking is to subscribe to a
good "e-conference". Normally this will gain you a dozen e-mail
messages per week on a subject of your interest, and a whole list of
international correspondents with whom you can discuss issues and of
whom you very usefully can ask questions.
1) Electronic Conferences
In most cases, an e-mail message to the address shown, saying, exactly:
subscribe <conference name> <Yourfirstname> <Yourlastname>
will obtain a subscription. Subscriptions are free.
ADBS-INFO "Association Franc,aise des Documentalistes et
Bibliothe'caires Specialise's"; subscribe to adbs-info-
request@univ-rennes1.fr ; for ADBS members, un - moderated.
BALZAC-L "French literature and culture"; subscribe to balzac-l-
request@cc.umontreal.ca; French/English; 250 subscribers.
BIBLIO-FR "Bibliothe'caires Franc,ais"; subscribe to biblio-fr-
request@univ-rennes1.fr; in French; 400 subscribers,
archive: gopher.univ-rennes1.fr, http://www.univ-rennes1.fr.
FRANCEHS "List for French history scholars"; 275 subscribers;
subscribe to francehs-request@uwavm.bitnet or
listserv@uwavm.u.washington.edu; in French and English.
There are others. The most useful tool for locating professional online
discussion of a particular topic is the list maintained by Diane Kovacs,
of Scholarly Electronic Conferences (there are many thousands more which
are un - scholarly -- Ms. Kovacs and her team perform an invaluable
filtering service). The Kovacs list, now on its 8th edition (1994),
is available in many places online. Most usefully here, it is
available from the University of Caen -- telnet caen1.unicaen.fr login
bibliotheque -- complete with a French interface and keyword searching
by subject (in English), title, and moderator's name.
2) Usenet
Usenet groups I personally do _not_ recommend, although it is good to
know that they exist. My problem is the lack of editorial control on
Usenet, and my own busy schedule and impatience. It is important to
realize, though, that France and the French have a Usenet presence.
The following is from a March 1993 general online announcement, from
Christophe.Wolfhugel@grasp.insa-lyon.fr , who should be consulted for
more information: "...send a note to 'fr-news-distribution@grasp1.univ-
lyon1.fr', preferably in french indicating you are searching for a feed.
Messages arriving to this address will be sent to the fr.news.
distribution newsgroup as well as to the peer mailing-list. To subscribe
to the mailing-list send the command "sub fr-news-distribution First
Lastname" to the address <listserver@grasp1.univ-lyon1.fr>. More
information, as well as an INN groups creation script can be retrieved
by anonymous ftp to grasp1.univ-lyon1.fr in pub/faq/fr.If you don't have
ftp access, ftpmail@grasp1.univ-lyon1.fr will furnish the same service."
3) "Frognet"
This nicely - named resource is a selection of daily Agence France
Presse wire postings, usefully assembled and posted online by a group
affiliated with the French Embassy in Washington. If you don't have the
patience to wade through daily reports of agricultural production
statistics and Olympique de Marseilles football scores along with other
news, you can avoid this by downloading the postings, either to a word
processor on an Internet account or to a pc / laptop, and then using the
word processor's "string search" capacity to look for material of
interest to you. Those with accounts on The WELL -- voice telephone
(USA) 415 - 332 - 4335 -- can take advantage of an even more useful
presentation of Frognet in the "france" conference there.
The original announcement of the "Frognet" service:
"En mars 1992, a l'initiative de la Mission Scientifique de l'Ambassade
de France a Washington et avec la collaboration du Service de Presse et
d'Information, se creait FROGNET. FROGNET permet aujourd'hui a tout
titulaire d'une adresse electronique de recevoir gratuitement une revue
de presse quotidienne en francais et une fois tous les 15 jours "News
from France", bulletin d'information en langue anglaise. Pour les
personnes residant en France, seul News from France est accessible pour
des raisons de copyright." Applications are obtained by e-mail request
to: FROG@GUVAX.GEORGETOWN.EDU .
***
France e - newsletter ISSN 1071 - 5916
*
| FYIFrance is a monthly electronic newsletter,
| 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 FYIFrance may be copied
----- and used by anyone for any good purpose, so long as,
// \\ a) they give me credit and show my e - mail address,
--------- and, b) it isn't going to make them money: if it is
// \\ going to make them money, they must get my permission
in advance, and share some of the money which they get
with me. Use of material written by others requires their permission.
FYIFrance may be found via gopher to infolib.berkeley.edu 72 and
gopher.well.sf.ca.us , and it is in various online archives: the easiest
to use is the PACS-L archive, reached via telnet to a.cni.org , login
brsuser . Suggestions, reactions, criticisms, praise, and poison - pen
letters all will be gratefully received at kessler@well.sf.ca.us .
***
end