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University of Maryland French Pamphlets
The University of Maryland Libraries hold a large collection of French pamphlets within their Rare Book Collection which have been been released on the Internet Archive. These pamphlets reveal valuable information about society during the upheaval of the French Revolution and provide cultural historians, linguists, and political scientists with important source material to study history, language, politics, government, and social issues.
As part of preliminary work on the development of a larger collection of French and English documents related to slavery in the 18th and early 19th century, we are developing automatic processes to run new OCR applications on existing pages images or to use existing OCR found in collections on various platforms for additional search and topic navigation capabilities. In this case, we have loaded the OCR of 761 documents, out roughly 850 documents available on the Internet Archive, after eliminating duplicates and documents out of our selected data range. This collection includes a number of titles related to the colonies that are not found in other collections, such as the Newberry FRC, the Brown Haiti collection, and the Brown French collection. We have not attempted to reOCR the documents in this collection at this time though we may try to use an LLM correction process at a later date.
This database should be considered to be a form of standoff index which provides facilities to link back to the Internet Archive site to browse page images. There are, of course, many errors in the OCR transcript and the user is advised to always use the page images as the definitive source for citation and other scholarly uses.
