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Sciences Po is one of the leading institutions for social sciences research in France, with a wealth of scholars in economics, history, sociology and political science.
Created in 1872, one year after the founding of the École libre des sciences politiques, the library is the main working tool for students and academic staff and has been so from the beginning. It is also open to a large number of readers from outside the institution (presently about 21% of the 10,000 card holders).
Collections
For more than sixty years it has made one of the richest collection of books and periodicals in the field of social sciences in Europe available.
Today it offers its readers access to more than 900,000 printed volumes, 650,000 of which are books, 11.000 titles of French and foreign serials (400 current subscriptions) 40 online databases providing access to the full text of more than 7,500 electronic serials and 140 CD-ROMs and DVD-Roms ; 18,000 press clipping files as well as 200,000 serial articles indexed and abstracted in its online database (approximately 9,500 articles are abstracted and indexed every year).
A part of the Library's collections is accessible on open stacks in seven reading rooms (offering 560 working spaces) distributed over three buildings - very close to each other and located in the heart of Paris - next to the classrooms and research centers of Sciences Po.
More on the Sciences Po's collection policy can be found here.
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Since 1982, the French National Ministry of Education has made it the Centre d’acquisition et d’information scientifique et technique (CADIST) in the field of political science. Since 1994, it has been the associated antenna (“Pôle associé”) with the Bibliothèque nationale de France for certain aspects of political science.
Institutional Repositories
Started in 2005, the IR project contains publications from Sciences Po researchers in economics. SPIRE (Sciences Po Institutional Repository) will soon offer access to publications in other disciplines.
The Library is a deposit for United Nations documents.
Digital Library Projects
The Library is an active participant in the elaboration of a collective catalogue for French university libraries known as the Système universitaire de documentation - SUDOC.
The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS) was administered at Sciences Po between 1952 and 1989. Today, it is run by the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Sciences Po remains closely linked to the production of the database bringing material from around 400 additional French language journals to IBSS.
Since 1946, the Library at Sciences Po has assembled press files on issues of political, economic and social interest globally. At the present time, some 18.000 press files are available to readers. A digitization program of these files started in 2005 and a database with press articles in full text is now available for Sciences Po Library users.
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