Gateways logo
ISSN 1443-0568 | no. 38 | April 1999


Networking with the library community

French connections

A new collaborative venture to improve access by scholars to French texts in the Humanities and Social Sciences has won a $112 000 Research Infrastructure, Equipment and Utilities (RIEF) grant. Partners in the venture, led by Professor Angus Martin of the Department of French Studies at the University of Sydney, are the National Library, the State Library of New South Wales and the university libraries of Adelaide, Queensland and Sydney. The project will bring together scholars and librarians to find ways of increasing cooperation in developing access to French language materials.

The project's partners have appointed Pauline Dickinson of the University of Sydney Library as executive director and have begun to map out a program which will involve consultations with the scholarly community about its research needs and a survey of the nation's institutions on the strength of their French holdings. It is one of the project's aims to identify the priorities and encourage the full cataloguing of those collections not yet available on the National Bibliographic Database.

Professor Angus Martin
Leader of the French Resources Project, Professor Angus Martin, from the University of Sydney.

Formal links will be sought with French libraries to allow access to material not held in Australia. A Web site will be established and maintained at the University of Sydney Library to provide an easy, single point of access to information about French language collections throughout Australia and overseas.

The partners believe that their venture will benefit not only those studying the French language and French literature, but scholars using French texts across the Humanities and Social Sciences—history, sociology, philosophy and even the history of science. The project could also serve as a case study for analyses of other foreign languages in Australia.

For further information, contact Pauline Dickinson by email at p.dickinson@library.usyd.edu.au, or by telephone on (02) 9351 4691, or by fax on (02) 9351 7305.

| Contents list for this issue of Gateways |

Please address any comments and enquiries to The Editor, Gateways: lkirwan@nla.gov.au

Gateways logo