French Collection Home Page

On-site Office Hours, Fall 2009: TBA

The French collection is housed on the 9th floor of the Wells East Tower. The Library of Congress call number ranges for French language and literature are PC2001-3761 and PQ1-3999. A number of print reference sources are available in the Reference Reading Room in these call number sections.

To find out about IU's holdings in French language and literature, you will need to search IUCAT. Successful searching of this catalog is something of an art in itself. You can search by title (remembering to omit initial articles) or by author, but you may find that you have more luck with a keyword search - for example, using an author's last name and a distinctive word from the title as keywords. Don't forget that it's also possible to search by call number, using the 'Call Number Search'.

To locate secondary sources on a particular author or topic, you will probably need to search some of the library's subscription databases. For journal articles, try the MLA International Bibliography and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (accessed through Web of Knowledge), but bear in mind that both of these are biased towards English-language publications. For French-language material, try FRANCIS. The full text of many scholarly journal articles is of course now available online, notably through JSTOR and Project MUSE. To access these resources, go to Recommended Resources (opposite), or to the library's Resource Gateway.

To search for monographs in research libraries worldwide, use WorldCat. Less well known is the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog, a metasearch of the research and national libraries of North America and Europe, which allows you to specify the catalogs you'd like to search. To locate materials in French libraries, you can also search the Catalog collectif de France (CCFr) or the catalog of the Bibliothèque nationale (BnF). Links to these are included under Useful Links (opposite).

The full text of a wide selection of historical French reference works is available online through the ARTFL project. To locate other Internet resources in French, try exploring portals and gateways such as Voice of the Shuttle, Intute, French Studies Web and French Links (again all accessible through Useful Links). These sites usually only include resources that have already undergone a process of selection and evaluation.

Page created by Catherine Minter

Last updated: May 6, 2009