History, sociology and philosophy of science

• History
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Iconography

History of science and technology

Providing an encyclopedic overview of the history of science and technology down the centuries and across every continent, the open-access collections at the François Mitterrand Library (Site François-Mitterrand) mainly cover the history of the following disciplines:

• mathematics
• astronomy 
• physics and chemistry 
• earth sciences, paleontology, and physical anthropology 
• natural history, biology, botany, and zoology 
• medicine 
• the history of technology
  

The history of technology covers the following fields:

• the history of technology in general, including industrial archeology and material on the universal exhibitions
• the history of engineering science and associated technologies 
• the history of means of transport and networks, very well represented in the Reference library 
• the history of agricultural techniques 
• the history of manufacturing industries
  

Some specific fields are particularly well represented within these collections. These include the history of textile techniques at the Reference library and the history of metallurgy at the Research library. The Library’s open-access collections also include a particularly wide range of materials on historiography and the history of scientific institutions, scientific education, and scientific instrumentation.

Both the Reference library and the Research library hold reference works in all the areas referred to above, such as encyclopedias, works summarizing the history of science, biographical dictionaries – and in particular the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, specialist bibliographies, and catalogs.

Both summary works and more in-depth studies are available for each scientific discipline over a given period. There are also scientists’ corpora – collections of material associated with a scholar – consisting of the works of that scholar and material associated with him or her: critical studies, biographies, etc.