La Bibliothèque Bleue de Troyes The Bibliothèque Bleue de Troyes represents a long and storied tradition in popular French print culture. Spanning more than 250 years and involving the publication of mass-produced, inexpensive books that were sold to peasants for pennies by colporteurs (peddlers), the Bibliothèque Bleue was comprised of texts ranging from the practical (recipes, almanacs, and how-to books) to the pious (hagiographies, prayer books, and other religious instruction) and to the entertaining (fiction, romans de chevalerie, songbooks, burlesque), providing a unique insight into the popular culture of 17th to mid-19th century France. The most significant collection (some 2570 volumes) of Bibliothèque Bleue material can be found at the Médiathèque de l'Agglomération Troyenne (MAT), whose digitzation efforts - digital page images of some 623 separate imprints - will form the basis of the Bibliothèque Bleue Online. SEARCH the Bibliothèque Bleue Online A cooperative effort between the Médiathèque de l'Agglomération Troyenne (MAT), The ARTFL Project of the University of Chicago and the Collaborative Initiative for French and North American Libraries (CIFNAL), the Bibliothèque Bleue Online will be comprised of the full text and page images of Bibliothèque bleue titles, encoded using the TEI-Lite data specification and loaded under PhiloLogic, the ARTFL Project's full-text search, retrieval and analysis tool. Beginning with the sixty-six sample texts included in this database, the Bibliothèque Bleue Online will eventually incorporate the entirety of the digitized Bibliothèque bleue material held at the MAT. The initial stages of this project will consist of data entry performed on the MAT digital page images, a signficant portion of which the ARTFL Project has agreed to finance in an effort to establish a strong corpus of texts and to foster further collaborative efforts. Additional questions concerning full bibliographic citations, error corrections, and the incorporation of new texts and engravings will be brought up with CIFNAL and the MAT in the near future. NB - The current version of this database is experimental and the text from initial data-capture has not been corrected. Users will find the character '$' where our contractors were unable to distinguish characters or words in the original page images. A corrections project will be undertaken during the final stages of this project.