February 15, 2003 issue. This file presents an archive copy of the issue of the FYI France ejournal, ISSN 1071-5916, which was distributed via email on February 15, 2003.
Versions of the following have appeared online regularly, since 1992, as a feature of the FYI France ejournal, ISSN 1071-5916, which is distributed for free via email every month except August. Ejournal subscriptions may be obtained via email request to: kessler@well.sf.ca.us
Here this file is one of a number made available -- hopefully
attractively, all in one place, and relevant to libraries and online
digital information work in France and Europe -- as part of FYI France
(sm)(tm), an online service to which anyone can subscribe for 12
months by postal mailing a check for US $45, payable to Jack Kessler, to
PO Box 460668, San Francisco, California, USA 94146 (site licenses also
are available): please write your email address on the front of your
check. Please email suggestions for improvements to me at kessler@well.sf.ca.us
--oOo--
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 *) --
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...
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]
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.
W3: http://un2sg4.unige.ch/athena/html/athome.html
W3: http://un2sg4.unige.ch/athena/html/authors.html
LITERATURE
SCIENCE
ARTS
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...
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 :
"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...
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
W3: http://www.paris.org/Maps/
Online maps! -- wonderful maps -- including:
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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Use of material written by others requires their permission.
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(BIBLIO-FR archive), or http://listserv.uh.edu/archives/pacs-l.html
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gratefully received at kessler@well.sf.ca.us .
Copyright 1992- , by Jack Kessler,
all rights reserved except as indicated above.
--hjlm--
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