The French Revolution Digital Archive (FRDA) is
a multi-year collaboration of the Stanford University Libraries and the Bibliothèque
nationale de France (BnF) to produce a digital version of the key
research sources of the French Revolution and make them available to the public
online. The archive is based around two main resources, the Archives
parlementaires and a vast corpus of images first brought together in
1989 and known as the Images de la Revolution française.
The Archives parlementaires is a chronologically-ordered
edited collection of sources on the French Revolution. It was conceived in the
mid 19th century as a project to produce a definitive record of parliamentary
deliberations and also includes letters, reports, speeches, and other
first-hand accounts from a great variety of published and archival sources.
Because of copyright limitations, FRDA contains the AP volumes
covering the years 1787-1794. The text of these volumes has been marked up
using TEI so that speakers, places, dates, and terms in the published index can
be easily found. Users can see both scanned images of the AP pages
or just the texts.
The Images are composed of high-resolution digital
images of approximately 14 000 individual visual items, primarily prints,
but also illustrations, medals, coins, and other objects, which display aspects
of the Revolution. These materials were selected, mainly from the collections
of the Département des Estampes et de la photographie, but also from other BnF
departments, and include thousands of images for the important collections
entitled Hennin and De Vinck. Detailed metadata exists for the images, so that
researchers can search by artist, subject, genre, and place.
