The Bibliography of Political and General French Press (Bibliographie de la presse française politique et d’information générale/BIPFPIG) and learned societies

The Bibliography of Political and General French Press (Bibliographie de la presse française politique et d’information générale/BIPFPIG)

Initiated in the 1950s, the BIPFPIG project has, since 1958, been a collective undertaking in which all French libraries and archive services holding local press collections have been asked to participate.

At the end of the 2007-2009 three-year research program, 61 volumes of BIPFPIG had been completed, covering 62 départements. The following eight regions are covered: the Auverge, Lower Normandy, Corsica, Franche-Comté, Languedoc-Roussillon, Limousin, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, and Pays de la Loire.

The latest volumes to be published were Indre, Loire-Atlantique, and Moselle in 2009, and Ardennes in 2010.

Currently in preparation are the Meurthe-et-Moselle, Dordogne, Charente, Côtes d’Armor, and Cher regions.

The Retrospective Inventory Department (Collections Division) is responsible for the program. The program has been financed by loans by the Research and Technology Mission of the Ministry of Culture and Communication (Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication/MCC) (BnF staff under contract) and, since 2007, by additional cooperation loans (with staff under contract cataloging collections located in regional libraries and departmental archives). External activities are governed by agreements.

Learned societies

Digitization of publications by learned societies is the fruit of cooperation between BnF and local authorities. Indeed, the corpus has been built up drawing on collections held by various institutions: not only BnF, but also departmental archives and municipal libraries.

The significance of this corpus of texts lies in the multidisciplinary nature of the subjects covered (agriculture, archeology, physics, economics, linguistics, etc.) and the variety of works available (editions of unpublished documents, research progress, findings from archeological digs, bibliographical reports, speeches, etc.).

BnF digitizes publications by learned societies using collections of duplicates and collections loaned or donated by regional partners (municipal libraries, departmental archives, and learned societies themselves). These publications began to be digitized in 1997, before the regional centers were established (2005). The inclusion of this objective in agreements entered into with agreed regional partners should significantly speed up the program’s progress.