BULAC's primary mission is to create relevant and strong collections of books and documents, mainly in vernacular languages, relevant to the languages and civilisations of the Balkans, Central and Eastern Europe, the Maghreb, the Near East, the Middle East, Central Asia, Africa, Asia, the South Sea Islands and Central and South America. Linguistics, literature, history and other fields in the humanities and social sciences are among the large disciplinary fields BULAC covers to promote understanding of these cultural areas.
La BULAC vue de la rue des Grands Moulins, de nuit (Grégoire Maisonneuve / BULAC).
A study and research library
At the library, the concept of “languages and civilisations” covers vast disciplinary fields in the humanities and social sciences, literature and arts of all the countries concerned.
The BULAC's collections bring together the holdings of around twenty libraries and collections specialized in languages and civilisations to offer a total of 1.5 million documents. One of the particular features of these collections is that nearly half of the original holdings were constituted by internationally-renowned researchers. The documents currently in our collections come in all formats—print (books and journals in all languages), printed sheets, photographs and audiovisual material or digital files.
The BULAC's collections thus answer to users' need to understand the way the world's civilisations are evolving on geopolitical, environmental, religious or cultural levels. BULAC aims to ensure that the documents in its field are both preserved on a long-term basis while being up-to-date with the means to create an interdisciplinarity international-level research center with high-level collections. It also aims to make its collections and services available to diverse sectors of society such as students, teachers, researchers or non-academic public and in this respect BULAC is unique among its kind.
Salle de la réserve (Grégoire Maisonneuve / BULAC, 2016)
Le fonds tibétain en libre accès au rez-de-jardin de la BULAC (Grégoire Maisonneuve / BULAC).
TheBULAC's collections giveaccess to a wide range of resources for eachgeographicalarea: Africa, MiddleEast, Maghreb and Central Asia, Balkans, Central andEastern Europe, Asia,Americaand Greenland, Pacific Oceania.
The digital collections of the BULAC reflect the wealth and diversity of our heritage holdings from all over the world and bring together documents chosen from among the library's most precious holdings - ancient prints, manuscripts, engravings, periodicals, etc.
Missions
The BULAC library's mission is to provide a space to help bring people together, but also a space meant to assist and inform people according to their needs, and a space for creation, reference and memory.
The library aims to develop a synergy between the world of Research and the library professions throughout the successive stages of scientific creation - from the process and processing of corpora and preservation and communication of documents. As this kind of ambition in the field of documentation involves such vast territories, it only makes sense in the broader framework of a partnership with other institutions which makes up a strong documentation network with accurate mapping of document resources in each field.
Location
The BULAC library is located at theheart of the “Pôle des Langues et Civilisations” (Languagesand Civilisations Centre), next to theInstitut national des langues et civilisations orientales (French National Institute of Oriental LanguagesandCivilizations),
Metro: line 14, stop at “Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand”.
RER C: stop at “Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand”.
La BULAC en automne (Grégoire Maisonneuve / BULAC)
The library premises and opening hours
BULAC mainly serves students, researchers and teachers but it is also open to other members of the public with an interest in our specialist collections... as long as they register. BULAC is on three floors:
The ground floor is mainly for students and contains basic and more general documents. An international “Kiosque” area is devoted to the news withprintjournals.
The garden level is for more advanced students, teachers and researchers. It contains more specialized and in-depth documents books and journals up to research level. The Reserve section is also on this floor.
The top floor is called "mezzanine". ThereyouwillfindDVDs, self-training methodsand computer stations to use for self-learninglanguages as well as themiscellaneous section of the collections.
The library hosts 910 work places with electric mains supply and Internet links, language self-training workstations, an audiovisual space and work rooms.
Please note that BULAC does not have a wifi connection so we advise you to bring your own Ethernet cable although cables can be lent out from the ground floor reception desk as long as stocks are available.
The documentary sector of the “Pôle des langues et civilisations”
The “Pôle des langues et civilisations” (Languages and Civilisations Centre) opened in October 2011, providing new facilities in the new Latin Quarter of Paris - the “ZAC Paris-Left-Bank”—alongside the Bibliothèque nationale de France François Mitterrand (BnF) [François Mitterrand National Library of France]. This centre has no equivalents elsewhere in the world, bringing together as it does the majority of resources and participants from the field of diversity of world languages and cultures. The “Pôle des langues et civilisations” also houses the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco), [French National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations] for teaching, together with BULAC (University Library for Languages and Civilizations) for documentation.
The “Pôle des Langues et Civilisations” has a 200-seat auditorium which regularly houses cultural and scientific events organized by Inalco, BULAC and their partners. The auditorium can be reserved for use by public or private sector organizations.
BULAC's Education and Research Coordination Mission was set up to galvanize exchanges between the library and the world of research into the geolinguistic sectors covered by BULAC.
There are multiples objectives to thisnamely:
promoting interaction between researchers and librarians
promoting the library's collections
getting researchers involved in the life of the library
organizing documentary mediation aimed at researchers
integrating BULAC into research networks
This Mission works on behalf of varied sections of the public including teachers, researchers, doctoral and post-doctoral students working on world cultural, political and economic diversity. Specific services are provided for these users, such as personalized assistance for researchers from other countries. The Education and Research Coordination (Coordination Enseignement et Recherche) mission is the designated contact for teachers and researchers to ensure constant coordination on priority acquisitions.
Conférence inaugurale du cycle « À quoi servent les frontières? », par Michel Foucher, janvier 2012 (Grégoire Maisonneuve / BULAC).
Part of BULAC's mission involves organizing cultural events with the aim being to provide alternative ways for people to discover all the singularity and wealth of BULAC's heritage collections and thus enrich their personal or professional culture.
BULAC's cultural events draw on all the forms, sources and formats of knowledge and include book-centred events, film screenings and exhibitions. These events promote the remarkable, specialist collections of the library, particularly our holdings in vernacular languages which help make the library so original, and also facilitate exchanges between different knowledge fields thus promoting transdisciplinarity and the transmission of knowledge.
Scientific Committee
Conseil scientifique de la BULAC - séance hybride du 10 juin 2021 (Maxime Ruscio / BULAC).
The Scientific Committee’s mission is to suggest the scientific orientations of the library (documentary policy, user services etc.) and to give the Board of Governors views and recommendations on the Group’s activity programme. Its particular responsibility is to supervise the relation between research and documentary policy. The Scientific Committee, under the chairmanship of Sylvie Denoix, is composed of the following:
Ms. Sandra Aube Chargée de recherche (CNRS)
Mr. Marc Aymes Research advisor (CNRS, EHESS
Mr. Olivier de Bernon Research advisor (EFEO)
Mr. Dmitry Bondarev Head of West Africa projects (University of Hamburg, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC))
Mr. Yannick Bruneton University Professor, Research advisor (Université Paris Cité, EPHE)
Ms. Françoise Daucé Research advisor (EHESS)
Ms. Françoise ’Nalini’ Delvoye Research advisor (EPHE)
Ms. Sylvie Denoix Research advisor (CNRS)
Mr. Emmanuel Francis Researcher (CNRS)
Mr. Clément Froehlicher-Chaix Chief library curator (Bibliothèque nationale de France)
Mr. Marc Gilbert Librarian (Leiden University, Netherlands)
Mr. Zhe Ji University Professor (INALCO)
Ms. Anne Madelain Associate professor (INALCO)
Ms. Luisa Mora Villarejo Head librarian of Islamic Library (Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation (AECID, Madrid))
Mme Pollet Samvelian University Professor (Sorbonne-Nouvelle)
Mr. Wolfgang Schmitt-Garibian Librarian (Bavarian State Library's Oriental and Asian Department)
Mr. Peter Stockinger University Professor (INALCO)
