Will the Annual Bibliography of France History Survive the 'New Technologies' Turn?: A Last Attempt to Enter the Twenty-First Century

This article describes the situation that a team of bibliographers has had to confront in the technological era that emerged in the last decade of the twentieth century. The scholarly publication at stake is the Annual Bibliography of France History, which comes from a long tradition originating in the late nineteenth century. Since the 1950s, a volume has been published each year, and each volume lists about twelve thousand references that pertain to works on the history of France from late antiquity to 1958. These references are classified among several indexes. Since 2000, several attempts to put that ‘native paper database’ online have been aborted. This article gives an account of the last attempt, which started in 2011, and shows that institutional problems, technical issues, and cultural questions are so deeply entangled together that we must embrace all those aspects in order to have a chance of success.