Website history
History of the Ressources Internet francophones at Lehman College, CUNY. Starting dates.
(Historique des Ressources Internet francophones à CUNY : dates de démarrage.)
January 1996 – French @ Lehman – Ressources Internet francophones A pioneering site of the global French-speaking Internet, the website earned considerable press in the first decades of the Internet as a resource for teachers, librarians, scholars and the general public.
Using the Wayback Machine (archive.org) and the former site addresses, one can find links to news features and historical highlights.
www.lehman.cuny.edu/depts/langlit/french
www.lehman.edu/deanhum/langlit/french
September 1997 – Souffles (1966-1971), revue culturelle du Maghreb / cultural journal of the Maghreb. Initiated in 1997, the digitization of the journal was completed in 2004. The archives were transferred from the CUNY site to that of Abdellatif Laâbi in 2024.
October 1998 – Île en île (1998-2021). An award-winning cultural archive featuring the world’s French-speaking islands and their diaspora, with a focus on literature. Hosted at Lehman from 1998 and evolving (with the Internet) to include audio, then video, the active archive was transferred to its own domain in 2015. Archived in 2021, Île en île remains available, presenting over 400 authors with biographies, bibliographies, and an extensive media archive of audio recordings and video interviews.
Autumn 1999 – FRACUNY (the Francophone Association of CUNY) hosted its first events (writers Louis Hamelin and Frankétienne) in the new Graduate Center building. Founded in 1993 to coordinate planning with CUNY professors and their metropolitan New York colleagues, FRACUNY merged its event schedule with that of the Ph.D. Program in French with the millennial transition of the Graduate Center. At the time, the website presenting CUNY’s graduate program in French incorporated the online resources at Lehman. Some video recordings for CUNY-TV were lost from the previous studio, but interviews with Francophone authors and scholars continue to be filmed in collaboration with programming for CUNY’s cable television channel.
https://www.gc.cuny.edu/french
https://tv.cuny.edu
2026 – French @ Lehman – Ressources francophones. Past its thirtieth year, the Ressources francophones website was transferred from the CUNY domain of Lehman to that of the Graduate Center of CUNY. The change facilitates updates and offers clear menus to find cultural and regional news, archives and global ressources. Highlighting the French program at Lehman College, the website continues to serve beyond CUNY and New York to the global Francophone community.
