La Contemporaine
La Contemporaine. Bibliothèque, archives, musée des mondes contemporains is a French cultural and scientific institution composed of a library, an archive center and a museum, specialized in the history of the 20th and 21st centuries. Founded in 1918, it is located since 2021 in a new building on the campus of the Paris Nanterre University.
Collections
The collections of La Contemporaine focus on the following areas :
The collections encompass a wide variety of types of documents, in several different languages . La Contemporaine holds close to 3 million text-based documents - books, newspapers and journals, as well as written and audiovisual archives ; and nearly 1,5 million works in its image-based collections – posters, photographs, paintings, drawings, objects, postcards… Its collections are recognized as unique due to the diversity of their origins, the range of topics covered, and the variety of the types of documents that are preserved.
Activities
La Contemporaine acts as a preservation and research facility, ensuring its collections are made available to researchers, organizing scientific events and training sessions and workshops for students and pupils, but also as a cultural institution for the general public through a permanent exhibition as well as yearly thematic exhibitions. It also develops partnerships with institutions both in France and internationally.
La Contemporaine created in 2014 its own digital library, L’Argonnaute, which gives free access to 200.000 digitized documents from its collections.
History
The institution was founded in 1918 as the « Bibliothèque-musée de la Guerre » on the basis of a private collection put together by French industrialists Henri and Louise Leblanc during World War I to document the ongoing conflict. In 1934, the BMG is administratively linked to the University of Paris and renamed « Bibliothèque de documentation internationale contemporaine » or BDIC. It retains that name through several location and status changes, until it becomes « La Contemporaine » in 2018. Starting in 1970, the institution has two centers, the main one, hosting the archives and the library was located in the Paris Nanterre University campus, that was founded in the outskirts of Paris in 1964, while the museum was seated within the premises of the Hôtel National des Invalides in the 7th arrondissement of Paris.In 2021, both centers are relocated in a new facility created by architect Bruno Gaudin, at the entrance of Paris Nanterre University campus.