Romans à lire: a database of French-language novels

Romans à lire is one of Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec's best-kept secrets. Initiated at the turn of the 2000s and constantly enriched, this resource takes advantage of titles acquired for the National Collection and the Universal Collection of the Grande Bibliothèque (GB), and offers GB subscribers a discovery tool. It enables them to search through tens of thousands of records of French-language narrative works for titles of interest to their reading desires. Searches in the database can be made by subject, place and historical period of the story, or by type of character. Or rather, this is the type of search that could be made until the team responsible for its development at BAnQ closed the query interface. The data acquired and enriched over the last two decades still exists, however, and BAnQ librarians are planning to give it a second life.

Can researchers reuse this resource, originally designed for the general public, to their advantage? What does it look like in concrete terms, how can it be used in a research context, and under what conditions? What does the BAnQ team plan to do with it? These are the questions we'll be asking at this meeting, to which students and researchers in literature, librarianship and digital humanities are invited.

The event is mostly in French.

Program:

8.30AM: Welcome of participants

9AM: introduction word by Pascal Brissette

9.05AM: Bloc 1: Interroger Romans à lire

9.05AM: Anthony Glinoer (U. de Sherbrooke), À la recherche des romans d’éditeurs

9.30AM: Karol'Ann Boivin (U. de Sherbrooke), Découvrir des architextes grâce à Romans à lire: exemple d'utilisation de l'outil dans une thèse en études littéraires

9.45AM: Pascal Brissette (U. McGill, CIRM), Roman-radar: un outil heuristique?

10.05AM: Lisa Teichmann, The role of Regionalism and Globalism in constructing the Imaginative Geography of the Romans à lire corpus

10.20AM: Julien Vallières-Gingras (CIRM), Repenser la référence aujourd'hui

10.40AM to 11AM : discussion, questions et pause

11AM: Bloc 2 : Faire vivre Romans à lire

Romans à lire: découvrir la littérature de langue française grâce à l'indexation

Patrick Trépanier
Ludwig Dubé
Xavier Jacob
Rui Liu

12PM to 12.30PM: discussion, questions, conclusion