French / francophone Information Sources
Advanced

Advanced research in French combines many elements besides your topic: mastery of the language, knowledge of the culture of one or more countries, and study of another discipline such as literature, history, education, or business as it relates to your region. The breadth of this task means that you must look in many parts of the library and web and seek materials varied in both format and language.  These notes are designed to refine your search methodology.

Some preliminary questions to ask yourself: 
In addition to containing information on your topic, what proportion of your material needs to be written in French?  How much should be published in a francophone country and/or reflect a French viewpoint?  Do your time constraints require items to be fulltext or owned by the library, or can some of them be ordered through ILL?  Finally, how will you apply critical thinking to determine if the resources you find are "good information"?

Features:

            expert-written background articles
            situation of your narrow topic within a broad panorama
            basic facts and figures
            selected bibliographic references

Search strategies:

Sample keyword search in the Carthage Innovative library catalog:

Forty-five reference works concerning different aspects of France and/or francophone nations are retrieved
by the above search.  A few—especially monolingual and bilingual dictionaries—are in French.

Component volumes of a series can be quite hard to identify. If you are looking for extensive overviews of  francophone writers, try Dictionary of Literary Biography, Ref PS 21 D554... for the volumes listed below:

Book chapters are likewise hard to find, unless you carefully examine the contents of a broad title. For example, you may have to browse the "CIA Factbook" to discover your nation among 268 country profiles full of geographical, demographic, governmental, economical, infrastructure data.

Features:

            broad treatment of important topics
            quality of work assured by big-name academic and commercial publishers

Search strategies:

Features:

You may be able to locate free online francophone article indexes by searching on "base de données" revues magazines (or bibliographique) in an English- or French-language search engine. However French licensed databases, either indexes or fulltext, seem to be less developed than in the US, are dedicated more to natural and social sciences than to humanities and arts, and are often available on a subscription or IP authenticated basis only. The following are examples of French databases:

Features:

            detailed information, frequently local, often polemic in nature
            need to analyze point of view and evaluate critically

Search strategies:

Sample resources:

Features:

            huge!!!
            evaluation requires super-acute critical thinking

Search strategies:

Choosing a search engine approach to retrieval of materials in French can be challenging.  US search engines are larger and more efficient, and entering French terms can be a remarkably quick solution.  Limiting the results of US search engines to French language yields fewer items to scan manually, but it may overlook important English-language material.  Local domain versions of US search engines, while few in number, can contain regional items not available elsewhere.  And search engines native to the country of interest, while usually limited in quantity of contents, offer the advantage of an other-country approach to information. For an ambitious project like a thesis, trying each different strategy may provide the most thorough approach.

Sample web resources:

Both print and electronic style guides are available, the former in the Hedberg reference area, and the latter linked to the Carthage web page:

Maintained by Tina Eger
Updated 24 November 2006