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Les bibliothèques d'artistes

Research methodology

Whether obtained in the form of a centralized archive, a detailed inventory, piecemeal lists, or solely through information glossed in primary sources, an artist’s library always serves as an extraordinary tool to penetrate the artist’s intellectual and cultural universe. However, it remains a distorted mirror of the artist’s mental library, i.e. everything an artist has read in his/her lifetime.

A library’s reconstitution as a corpus therefore poses a variety of epistemological, methodological,  technical, as well as material challenges.

On this page, you will find tools that help you tackle research along this complex and fascinating  archival journey.

Ségolène Le Men, Les bibliothèques d'artistes : une ressource pour l'histoire de l'art

Published in the 2016/2 issue of the journal Perspective, actualité en histoire de l'art (p.111-132), this article examines the impact of the study of these new corpus on our perception of works of art and artists and therefore finally on the writing of the history of art.


Félicie Faizand de Maupeou, Les bibliothèques d'artistes au prisme des humanités numériques

Published in the 2016/2 issue of the journal Perspective, actualité en histoire de l'art (p.175-180), this article, focuses on how to treat and study the artists' libraries, whether physical or reconstituted, thanks to new digital technologies. It is based on the example of the management of the project for the implementation of the portal Les Bibliothèques d'artistes.


Félicie Faizand de Maupeou et Ségolène Le Men, The Artists libraries Project in the Labex Les Passés dans le présent

This article was published in the special issue of the Journal of Data mining and digital humanities devoted to the Digit-hum workshop which has been held at the Ecole normale supérieure since 2015 and which explores new digital tools at the service of social science. It presents the challenges and developments of the project from both a technical and scientific point of view.


Presentation of the project at 2019 OCLC EMEARC Conference

The Artists librairies projec has been presented at the OCLC annual conference on the theme « Libraries as  Drivers of Change ».


Workshop at Hartung-Bergman foundation

In 2019, the research program gathered several researchers for a workshop exploring the links betwenn the artists and their books collection, through case study. We also examined different digital treatemants of those founds in the aim of drawing good practices and also to understand what digitalization done to the study of those corpus.


Bibliography from the BnF on the history of librairies (in French)

This bibliography takes stock of the progress of research on the history of libraries. It highlights the works that have entered the National Library of France since the first book workshop, organized in 2010.


2.0.1 Journal - Art et Bibliothèques issue (in French)

Published in November 2009, this issue of the journal 2.0.1 focuses on the library as "the architecture of scientific knowledge, both literally and figuratively". Throughout the various contributions, the emphasis is placed on the principles which govern the organization of these libraries.