The Collège de France, with the support of Paris Sciences et Lettres, has restored and digitized its lecture posters produced between the 17thand 19th centuries (from 1688 to 1900). Today, this project gives the public and researchers remote access to a collection of almost 380 posters.
The benefits of this kind of distribution are twofold. Firstly, it offers the possibility of following the continuous evolution of the institution's readings, and provides a clear chronology of scientific successions. Secondly, thanks to the presence of handwritten annotations on certain pieces, it gives an insight into the genesis of their production, and offers valuable material for detecting what chronology alone can obscure by giving too smooth a panorama.
Posters are a difficult medium to work with: their format makes them difficult to consult, prints for correction are generally of inferior quality, and the pieces have been stored in poor conditions for over two centuries in some cases. Thanks to restoration and digitization work, a coherent corpus has been preserved from deterioration and made available to all.
