First page of the “Indexer sur Recueil de journaux, 1790-1802” (“Index to a Collection of Newspapers”). The collection is made up of 28 volumes of political bulletins curated by an anonymous observer of the events of the French Revolution.
University of Kentucky Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center is home to a remarkable collection that may drive Kentuckians to defend – or decapitate – a king.
The French Revolution Publications Collection consists of nearly 5000 political bulletins, printed from the beginning of the long and bloody French Revolution through the ascendancy of Napoleon Bonaparte, which have been recently digitized and made accessible to researchers around the world.
An unknown curator who lived during the period collected these bulletins and bound them into 27 volumes, grouping them by title and arranging them chronologically during the years 1790-1802, as reflected in a magnificent handwritten index. The full set contains 28 volumes, though one was missing when UK Libraries purchased the collection in the 1990s.
“Whoever did the initial curating represented all sides of the conflict – which is very unusual,” said Library Imaging Specialist Crystal Heis, who oversaw the digitization of the bulletins and meticulously created metadata for each of them last year. “And as a collection, it is absolutely one-of-a-kind.”
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
