The Fédération Equestre Internationale (FEI) has annnounced that resources of La Bibliothèque Mondiale du Cheval (the Worldwide Horse Library) are now available through FEI Campus, the free, certified equestrian e-learning and community platform of the FEI. To learn more about the library, visit this link.
 

Innovative digital resource

La Bibliothèque Mondiale du Cheval is an innovative digital library. It combines the resources of public and private libraries around the world on the subject of the horse. As it states on the library website: “The horse is an inexhaustible subject of culture, technology and civilization. Thousands of books have been devoted to it [and] hundreds of authors have tackled it over the centuries, in Europe but also throughout the world. The ambition of the World Horse Library is to unearth them, to list them [and] to list them where they are found in public or private libraries in order to constitute, in France, the world’s first virtual library of libraries dedicated to it.”
 

This unique library currently has an inventory of more than 15,000 books, according to the library website. More than a quarter of these have been digitalized, and the library is constantly being enriched with new works. It is a highly collaborative initiative open to all existing public and private libraries. These bodies retain their copyright while becoming a part of the library’s corpus. Besides being digitalized, the books are cross-referenced and annotated by experts in various fields. This takes the project to a higher scientific and methodological level.
 
La Bibliothèque Mondiale du Cheval benefits from exceptionally advanced interdisciplinary research on digital documents and is being supported by the French authorities.
 

A partnership

The FEI and the Maison de la Recherche en Sciences Humaine MRSH, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique MRSH CNRS (Human Sciences Research Centre, National Centre for Scientific Research) of the University of Caen in France have entered a partnership regarding this exciting project.
 
The MRSH/University of Caen is a worldwide digital publishing leader.
 
In the framework of this partnership, a conference is organized on an annual basis. This year’s event on October 17 is dedicated to the centenary of Portuguese equestrian and Dressage master Nuno Oliveira. The conference program is available here.

About the FEI

The Fédération Equestre Internationale (FEI) was created more than 100 years ago to oversee the Olympic disciplines of Jumping, Dressage and Eventing with just eight member signatories. Today, alongside the Olympic disciplines, the FEI also governs the non-Olympic disciplines of Driving, Endurance and Vaulting as well as the Para Equestrian disciplines of Dressage and Driving. The FEI has 136 member National Federations.