Sciences, Technology and Medicine

The rich scientific collections of the Alsatian universities include manuscripts, printed documents as well as iconographic material. The main disciplines represented are natural sciences, materials sciences, applied sciences for industry, earth and universe sciences, medicine and mathematics.

The collection relating to the history and industrial heritage of the city of Mulhouse and the SIM (Mulhouse Industrial Society), collected since the 19th century, is currently being digitised, particularly its iconographic components.
 

The Strasbourg collections (approximately 200,000 volumes) are inherited from the libraries of the Académie before 1870 and then from the former German Imperial University from 1872 onwards. They belong for the most part to the BNU (National University  Library) and are promoted by the University of Strasbourg Libraries, where they are kept on deposit.

Several collections stand out for their richness:

•     the Hermann Collection, put together by the naturalist Jean Hermann (1738-1800), is largely concerned with natural and medical sciences. Digitisation of these books started in 2005 and focuses on the volumes which contain the most annotations;
•     the world's most complete collection of notes from mathematical courses given in Berlin by Leopold Kronecker (1823-1891). The original manuscripts, kept in the Library of the Institut de Recherche Mathématique Appliquée (Institute for Applied Mathematical Research), are entirely digitised.

The digitisation operations also concern some collections of institutes of proven interest (geology in particular).