Profile of the Sciences Po University Library

A Brief presentation of Sciences Po
Sciences Po, is one of Europe's leading universities which fully unites the four missions determining its academic nature: education, research, documentation and publishing. Sciences Po is a renowned educational and scientific institution which makes it one of the most important French institutions in the social sciences and is a prestigious international university.

• Education. Sciences Po offers several curricula, ranging from undergraduate to doctoral programmes. In addition to its regular student body of 6.000, each year 6.500 public and private sector executives and managers enroll in continuing education courses at Sciences Po. Undergraduate studies at Sciences Po takes place on 5 campuses: Dijon, Menton, Nancy, Paris and Poitiers. The Sciences Po Master's Degree prepares its graduates to assuming high responsibility positions in private companies, media, public administrations, NGOs or in the academic fields. Its 12 professional majors combine a core curriculum in the social sciences, specialized courses, internships and teamwork, thereby enabling students to hone their knowledge and experience to the demands of the job market.

  More on Sciences Po's curricula

• Research. 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. Affiliated to it are 8 research centres (two of them are specialised in Economics: the Observatoire français des conjonctures économiques - OFCE - and the Service d'étude de l'activité économique - Groupe d'économie mondiale - SEAE/GEM), 180 research and faculty members and a Doctoral School with 600 doctoral students. Sciences Po Doctoral School also offers a Master of Research composed of five programmes (Economic Governance, International relations, Political History and Political Theory, Sociology of Action, Comparative Societies and politics).

• Documentation (see infra)

• Publishing. The Presses de Sciences Po, with 6 academic journals, a catalogue of 950 titles (30 new titles per year), contributes to disseminating scholarship in French humanities and social sciences at both national and international level.

  
  

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 (4.000 current subscriptions) 30 online databases providing access to the full text of more than 700 electronic serials and 120 CD-ROMs and DVD-Roms ; 18.000 press clipping files as well as 180.000 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

Institutional Repositories
The Library is a deposit for United Nations documents.

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.

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. SUDOC is a collective digital catalogue which includes the bibliographical description of all documents housed within higher education libraries, irrespective of the type of document concerned, (printed, audiovisual or computerised material). It also provides information on the whereabouts of each document and deals with interlibrary loans.

• 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 and this input will soon further increase when information on articles from French periodicals is added.

• 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. During 2005, the process of making these files available in digital form will begin, thus improving accessibility to the files through Sciences Po's website.

• From 2005 on, all doctoral theses written at Sciences Po will be digitally available and accessible online via the library catalogue.

Contact Persons

For information regarding resource questions, please contact the information desk via mail: info.docum@sciences-po.fr

For questions regarding Nereus and Sciences Po's involvement, please contact:

Bénédicte Barbé
Librarian
Sciences Po
27 rue Saint-Guillaume
75 337 Paris Cedex 07 France
Tél : 33 (0)1 45 49 56 67
Fax : 33 (0)1 42 22 99 80
benedicte.barbe@sciences-po.fr

Michel Gardette
Director of Sciences Po Library
Sciences Po
27 rue Saint-Guillaume
75 337 Paris Cedex 07 France
Tél : 33 (0)1 45 49 51 51
Fax : 33 (0)1 42 22 99 80
michel.gardette@sciences-po.fr

The Library Website can be found under
http://www.sciences-po.fr/docum