VANCOUVER- Jean-Dominique Mellot will give a talk entitled, “Books in the Information Age: The Bibliothèque Nationale de France and Its Digital Library,” 3-4 p.m. Oct. 10, at Washington State University Vancouver, Multimedia Center Room 6.
Mellot will discuss the history of France’s national library (akin the U.S. Library of Congress in mission and scope) and the new Gallica project – France’s effort to digitize the 80,000 published works in its collection so as to make them more accessible to a wide range of readers and scholars around the world.
Mellot, senior conservator at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and lecturer at the Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, is a distinguished historian of early-modern print culture in France. Mellot has coordinated several major publishing projects concerning the history of publishing, printing and the book. He has authored a major study on the Rouen book trade (1600-1730) and is currently co-editing an international publishing project on the history of book censorship in France and Russia, sponsored by the Russian Academy of Sciences.
