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The Inalco archives, a unique source for scientific and historical heritage
Institute
Eight thousand archive boxes and some fifty cartons stored at the Pôle des Langues et Civilisations during the renovation of the Maison de la Recherche have been repatriated to rue de Lille, where they have been given a comfortable shelf and the chance to meet the public.
The importance of their transfer and the reorganization of their storage conditions has an impact on everyone, archivists of course, but above all readers. This major move has in fact made it possible to start restructuring the condition of the archive collections, with the aim of making them more visible and accessible.
The new premises have also made it possible to make the archives more accessible to the public.
Rich with more than two centuries of history, the archives of Inalco constitute the institutional memory of the establishment and all the people and students who have worked there.
These thousands of unpublished documents tell us about the history and activity of research and teaching of oriental languages in France from 1795 to the present day. But while their importance is indisputable, their conservation history has been rather troubled. That's why they are now part of a major restructuring and enhancement project to restore to the general public these papers with their oriental flavors and ancient history.
The Archives Mission was created in September 2008 to meet the regulatory, legal and historical needs of this public establishment. Since its creation, several archivists have succeeded one another, and a flood seriously affected some of its archives. It took a decade of running-in and effort to complete a real renovation program and open to the public in 2020. Today, within the Service de l'Information scientifique, des Archives et du Patrimoine (SISAP), several agents work to collect, preserve and promote Inalco's historical and scientific heritage.
The refurbishment of the cellars in which the archives are kept, on the occasion of the renovation of the Hôtel de Bernage in 2018, necessitated the transfer of all archive holdings to a temporary facility set up for the occasion on the site of the Pôle des langues et civilisations (PLC). The inauguration of the Maison de la Recherche in 2020 opens a new chapter not only for Inalco, but also for its archives, whose repatriation to 2 rue de Lille completes the modernization of the Institute's historic site. What's more, the refurbishment of the premises has led several departments and professions to collaborate in an efficient and cross-disciplinary way, proof that archives are everyone's business. The SISAP, for example, received invaluable support from its colleagues in the Budget and Public Procurement Department, the Administrative and Technical Department of the Maison de la Recherche, the Logistics Department and the President's Secretariat.
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Yellowed student files, black-and-white photographs, slides and old maps are just some of the nuggets that the Service de l'Information scientifique, des archives et du patrimoine is preparing to share with you. Since September, archivists have been working on the resumption of the general inventory - or récolement - and the drafting of a statement of holdings that should be accessible online. Would you like to find out if your ancestors graduated from Inalco? Curious to find out how a Persian or Chinese course was organized in the 1980s? Or would you rather discover the secrets of the Hôtel de Bernage? This statement of holdings will give you details of the documentary collections held at Inalco, or at the Archives nationales for the oldest documents.
As a complement to this major effort to restructure archive holdings to facilitate access, SISAP is actively involved in the D-PaRSAS project through a vast program to digitize scientific archives. The aim of this project is to put online a set of corpora produced by teacher-researchers, with a view to promoting the valorization, sharing and reuse of research data. This project is fully in line with Inalco's open science policy, in which SISAP plays a leading role. By the end of 2022, the general public will be able to discover a number of digitized collections of significant scientific and heritage interest: photographs of ethnographic fieldwork, unpublished writings and old teaching booklets will all be available as resources for research and the promotion of areal studies.
Article by the Service de l'Information scientifique, des Archives et du Patrimoine, November 2021.