Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon

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Since there was no university in Lyon in the early Renaissance, the City Council founded a city college, the Collège de la Trinité, in 1527. The Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon originated as the library of the college which was run by humanist regents before being entrusted to the Jesuits in the second half of the sixteenth century. The library received donations of important collections as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century and quickly grew into a remarkable repository, according to its many foreign visitors. It became public at the time of the departure of the Jesuits from France in 1765. Later, during the French Revolution, it received the collections which had been confiscated from the forty-four convents of the city, most of them major players in the history of Lyon, and from the Chapter of the cathedral. Its collections were enhanced by many important gifts and bequests in the course of the nineteenth century. It received again major collections from the Cathedral chapter, following the Law of Separation between Church and State in 1905 and has not stopped growing since. This library’s collections are therefore intricately linked to the city’s cultural history and reflect its developments. Of especial note is the period from the Renaissance when Lyon, with four fairs per year, boasted important book production as well as many cultural and commercial exchanges with the rest of Europe. Since 1999, the library has hosted 500,000 volumes from the Bibliothèque des Fontaines, deposited by the Jesuits of Chantilly. Universality and encyclopaedism are the main characteristics of this collection, with a well-documented vision of theological and religious matters. It also enables a precious perspective on human sciences and on the European civilization from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and presents the history of Catholic spirituality in its social and cultural context.

The file includes about 13,000 bibliographic records which describe early printed books from the pre-1800 collections of the library, starting with incunabula, covering a wide range of material. These records were selected for their copy-specific information, particularly provenance, which has been made available on-line for more than ten years on the library’s website (see Provenance database: http://numelyo.bm-lyon.fr/collection/BML:BML_06PRV01000COL0001). This provenance information has also been included in the CERL Thesaurus since 2006 and is regularly updated.

While most of these books have originally been catalogued “book-in-hand”, other records have only been updated to include the relevant index terms and detailed description. Some records resulting from retroconversion programmes still require fingerprints, indexing of printers, place of publication, signature collation and subject indexing. Notes and copy-specific data are included as much as possible in records. BNF name headings have been.

In case of multiple volume editions, the record of the edition includes the descriptions of all the volumes. In case of multiple copies of the same edition, the description of all copies appear inside a single record in order to allow comparison.