Research areas

The challenges and objectives of the Faire collection are of three types:

• scientific: to write the history of these collections, both connected and comparative, from a diachronic perspective that includes the very contemporary.
• epistemological: to use the collections to reflexively renew the approaches of members of the scientific community to their own practices as researchers, teachers and (self-)archivists. For example, understanding the genesis of scientific fields on the basis of the collections on which they have been based; rediscovering the scientific approaches implicit in collections of historical instruments; reflecting on what it means to choose to discard or conserve, and to keep track of failures.
• political: to understand the role of these collections in building a community of researchers, teachers and students; to make them visible and sensitive to this community, while considering the new challenges associated with them, in a context of rapid changes in the conditions of research; to respond to or anticipate social demands, in order to give society a better understanding of what scientific research is.

To answer these questions, two lines of research will be scoured.

1. The collection, a fragile history

1.1 Collections on the move

Rather than considering the collection as a fixed object, the project intends to pay attention to the processes of the collection “in the making”, through the moments of investment and institutionalization of the collections (allocation of premises—Management Museum—, drafting of inventories). It will also focus disengagement, invisibilisation, dispersal, destruction, as well as reinvestment, re-semantisation and patrimonialisation. The study will pay attention to the moment at which the collection “takes hold”, when it acquires meaning for those involved. Furthermore, the collections that are not (if ever) considered as such will be analysed too—for example because they are made from scraps, duplicates, second-choice objects that have not been integrated into recognized collections (which is often the case with educational collections) or that have disappeared (ghost collections). Attention will also be paid to the material and intellectual technologies that underpin collecting practices.

This area will concern all the collections present within Université PSL, resulting from research and teaching activities, including those that have been transferred at some point to permanent conservation sites (Archives nationales, Humathèque Condorcet, BnF, IMEC, etc.). It will not aim to intervene in these funds (neither classification operations, inventories, etc.) or to replace the activities of the centres where they are conserved, it will be closely associated to the project. It will however include support for study projects and the valorisation of archive documents and specific collections, in order to contribute to writing the History of Research based on the traces it has left.

This approach will draw on the skills of the various disciplinary sectors present in PSL, likely to shed light on the constitution and uses of the collections: Humanities and Social Sciences (History, Sociology, Anthropology, Philosophy, History of Art and Archaeology, Digital Humanities), Exact Sciences, Chemistry, Biology, Physics.

It will be based both on the collections as we can observe them today or reconstitute them in their material form, and on the archives that document their history. The partnership with the Archives nationales, the BnF, the IMEC and the Humathèque is essential in this respect. The historical archives of the administrative and scientific governance of most of the institutions at the heart of Université PSL are now kept at the Archives nationales, due to their influence, centrality and age. This is the case for ENS - PSL, ENC - PSL, Université Paris Dauphine - PSL, INSERM, CNSAD - PSL, CNRS, including the IRHT, and more recently, the EPHE - PSL (7 out of 14 PSL member institutions). The same goes for PSL partners, all or part of the archives of the INSP, ENSBA, ENSAD - PSL, ENSAPM and CNSMDP (5 out of 10)—12 archive collections out of 24 PSL member or partner institutions. These archives are first and foremost a cross-disciplinary source for the history of scholarly and university collections, and the way in which they have been forged, passed on or dispersed over time. These archives will be exploited not only insofar as they document the history of collections, but also as collections themselves. Research archives, whether individual or collective, can become “collections” and now, increasingly, “data”. We need to look at the way in which they have been placed in archives and transformed into potential “data”, identifying what makes them “reusable” for future research, particularly in the digital environment.

A similar approach could be developed for the fonds of researchers’ and intellectuals’ papers currently held at the BnF, the IMEC or the Humathèque archives, which have yet to be inventoried for the various PSL institutions. These archives are both a source for the History of collections and an object of research in themselves: the “archival behaviour” of researchers is a particular practice of collecting.

1.2 Collections for tomorrow

Working on the collections of objects and archives produced, including those from the present time, should highlight the complexity, gaps, grey areas, conservation and study difficulties and the need to put in place conservation policies for the intermediate data produced. In this way, the project should contribute to a debate on how to efficiently select and preserve the data from research in progress. The growing importance of natively digital data, as well as the long-standing existence of such data, means that we need to look at the conditions under which this data and the tools used to read it are stored and processed. At the same time, we must not forget the continued use of paper archives and objects (books, work instruments, films, recordings, digital data, artefacts resulting from research activities) in academic activities, which means that we need to ask ourselves what “collecting” will mean for future generations of researchers.

The project also has an ethical and legal dimension, which we intend to explore in greater depth by looking at aspects relating to the documentation of provenance, the ownership of objects, living data, forms of appropriation and the question of restitution. The porous nature of the academic and industrial worlds, and the presence of patrons, means that we have to consider the co- ownership of archives (data, documents, works, objects), which is a corollary of the co- ownership of research work and results, but which is often overlooked in cooperation contracts (unlike in the case of results). Finally, the challenge is to enable a more balanced History of Research to be written, making room for the different levels of intervention by research players, their gender, their status, the forms of formal and informal, local, regional and international cooperation, and the link between the History of Science and the study of public policies (national, European, transnational).

2. What collections do for research

2.1 Creating community through collections, past and present

In a French academic world marked since 2009 by a major wave of university mergers and the creation of new academic clusters, the identification and the promotion of common cultural references are pivotal. From this point of view, PSL University represents an exceptionally stimulating terrain to examine what existing collections and those to be created can contribute to the construction of new communities resulting from the coming together of formerly autonomous institutions. The impact of the material transformation of collections on these processes also needs to be considered: while objects and documents could easily be a place for teams to recognize each other, we need to reinvent the ways in which we build community around digital forms.

The history of institutions is commonly narrated from an internal perspective. Our project hypothesizes that collections are a particularly relevant place to observe the forms of institutionalization and the way in which institutions tell their own history. Libraries, archives, databases, corpora, series of instruments and specimens document the way in which institutions and communities have built, defined and thought themselves on the basis of their collections, and how they continue to live and work on the basis of this capital.

However, the study of the collections also highlights the limitations of this monographic approach, which is unsuitable for an academic world which is well-established and intricately interconnected, where individuals are constantly on the move. The project will allow us to gain a deeper understanding of the links—some of them long-standing—that exist between the component institutions of PSL, but also those that exist between PSL and other academic players, and between the academic and non-academic worlds. For example, there are the collections built up in the 19th century and distributed between different institutions on the basis of affiliation, recognition or individual familiarity: the cuneiform tablets shared between the EPHE - PSL, the Louvre and the BnF; the Korean manuscripts between the Collège de France, the BnF and the BULAC, and so on. There are also long-standing links between the various French schools abroad and certain PSL institutions, particularly in the context of archaeological excavations.

These links need to be considered on a multi-scalar basis: on a micro level, that of the individual and his or her research team; on an intermediate level, that of the institution; and finally, on a macro level, that of the disciplines or international projects that make it possible to develop a transnational study of PSL-type consortia on the basis of the history of their collections. In some cases, these links are part of an already long history, marked since at least the 19th century by forms of collaboration between institutions and between researchers, and by the movement of individuals, their work tools and their archives from one institution to another during the course of their careers. They also take the form of projects developed on a national and international scale. The management and sharing of material and intellectual heritage, and the definition of complementary centres of excellence, are examples of more or less institutionalized forms of collaboration, at the level of individuals, laboratories or institutions. In other cases, these links are more tenuous or have yet to become apparent. At last, because the status of the most recent archives is, in practice, imprecise, the shared History, as it is currently being constructed (following, in particular, of project- based research), often remains poorly known because it is difficult to write due to a lack of usable sources.

From both a historical and a reflexive perspective, we could consider geo-chronological modelling of scientific collaborations using a datavisualisation tool (such as Netscity) fed with data from the indexing of provenance marks in collections and research archive holdings, including the most recent period. Modelling the career paths of researchers using the Notices nécrologiques de la Section des sciences historiques et philologiques, 1868–2019, edited by P. Henriet (2019–2020), could also be attempted in this context. This study will provide a detailed picture of the evolution over time of the scientific networks inherent in PSL teams and the ecosystem in which they are embedded (funding, partnerships, publishers, etc.), of which the collections are tangible traces.

The project thus has a research-action dimension: looking at all the sites’ collections should help to tell the story of a community.

2.2 Collecting teaching, teaching with collections

Storytelling of the various institutions that make up PSL is deeply rooted in a shared ambition to educate through research and to develop innovative forms of teaching. PSL collections witness to both the evolution and the deployment of thinking on teaching practices. This is exemplified by the adoption of the seminar format, work in small groups, the direct contribution of students to the research being carried out, practical exercises and the place given to student expression and initiative. These courses were also taught outside the classroom, sometimes even abroad, such as at the Observatoire, where astronomical observations were carried out, or at the EPHE-PSL, where Egyptologists trained their students in surveying and copying directly on excavation sites. As well as enriching teaching practices, these relocations also produced collections and archives (photographic collections, correspondence and grey literature: excavation reports, administrative documents, ministerial reports, etc.). Taken as a whole, both the research and teaching objects brought together at PSL and the archives that accompany them form an exceptional whole, with uses that are sometimes shared between establishments, and whose history is currently very unevenly documented. The aim of this Major Program is to retrace the logics of the material, institutional and intellectual constitution of PSL’s teaching collections and to reconstruct their role and place in teaching practices in order to re-examine the issues, methods and uses of educational collecting.

Developing this dual focus means basing research both on the study of archives and on that of the collections themselves. This methodological choice stems from one observation: although certain collections are still used in seminars (Humathèque Condorcet, Museum d’Histoire naturelle, Galerie de l'Observatoire, etc.), they are often dispersed in different conservation areas or unevenly preserved. This is the case, for example, with the M. Chabert collection of scientific instruments at the EPHE - PSL, which represents only a tiny fraction of the scientific instruments used by students in their original laboratory. In addition, it is often difficult to distinguish between collections of books or working instruments built up for research purposes and those used for teaching, as these objects are commonly used alternately for one or other activity, or even for both. The library of the École des chartes thus conserves old works used by researchers, but also directly linked to teaching, where they are used as material support in courses on the history of books and material bibliography. The teaching archives also constitute an important, as yet little-exploited, source of material that makes it possible to rematerialise the times and spaces in which teaching collections were developed, their main players and the actions and practices to which they were linked.

In this respect, two types of archives can already be identified:

• The teaching archives, comprising lectures, preparatory documents (drafts, sketches, copies, tracings, field notebooks, etc.) and lecture notes taken by students, which have been the subject of a large number of digitisation operations but which have yet to be studied in their entirety.
• Institutional archives, which document both the people and processes involved in building up the collections of objects available to libraries and research laboratories, and the objects that researchers felt they lacked (the holdings of the Archives nationales are extremely rich in this respect).

The exploration can also be extended to institutions that have had links with or housed certain higher education establishments, such as the Sorbonne for EPHE - PSL, whose photographic heritage documents the places and methods of teaching since the third quarter of the 19th century (reserve, Sorbonne BIS).

On the one hand, archives make it possible to document the acquisition process and make visible the links, collaborations and exchanges between institutions. Depending on the historical context, some teachers justified the needs of teaching or research in order to increase their collections. The École normale supérieure archives, now held by the Archives nationales, are full of lists of works acquired or to be acquired, as well as lists of work instruments that the laboratories had or would have liked to have in order to provide their students with cutting-edge teaching. Building up collections of educational objects also reveals links between institutions that often go back a long way. During the Third Republic, professors at the ENS - PSL repeatedly approached the École des Beaux- Arts to obtain casts so that they could develop practical forms of teaching. It was this model, originally inspired by the German way, that prompted the Mercier family to donate a small collection of antiques to the ENS in 1922, albeit somewhat anachronistically.

Archives also enable us to work on the material history of teaching, and the development of teaching methods and educational materials. In addition to the many notebooks, lecture notes and drawings (Mines Paris - PSL, EPHE-PSL, ENS - PSL…), the issue of educational collections is also very topical in art schools and schools of architecture. Over the years, the accumulation of teaching materials, commissioned by institutions, produced by professors, or inspired by student work, has produced collections that do not always have the name, visibility or legitimacy. As awareness of this educational heritage grows, inventories and studies are being carried out to document both the materiality of the collections and the teaching methods used. Work has already been done on some of these, such as the collection of “sight-readings” (pieces to be deciphered) commissioned by the Conservatoire from the early nineteenth century to the inter-war period, already studied as part of the ANR HEMEF (2014–2018). Others remain to be studied by gathering archival sources on them, such as the Bottée de Toulmon correspondence, director of the Conservatoire library in the 1830s and 1840s, preserved at the BnF, which sheds light on the constitution of collections for educational and scholarly purposes in the mid-19th century. This is also the ambition of the Management Museum at Université Paris Dauphine - PSL, which will go from being a temporary structure to a permanent one in 2024. The challenge of the Major Program is also to break down the barriers between these case studies and approach them in a cross-disciplinary way to highlight consonant developments or specific features of disciplinary fields.