Welcome to histalu.orgThe site for the history of aluminium
In thirty-five years, the IHA has acquired a unique set of resources on the history of aluminium and its industries: specialized library, documentary collections, company archives, or bequests by private individuals, visual and audio-visual collections, and a corpus of written or oral testimonies.
The CulturAlu Platformal brings together the databases developed by HA and its partners since 2006, in order to enhance these collections and make them accessible to as many people as possible.
The Aluminum Library, developed by the IHA in 2013 with the support of the National Research Agency, catalogues the majority of the IHA's documentary collections and allows some of the documents to be consulted online.
The catalogue is regularly added onto through digitization initiatives that are carried out in order to put more resources online.
The Visual Aluminum Library has been accessible to the public since May 2009. It was developed by the IHA with the support of the Service interministériel des Archives de France (SIAF) (The French Inter-Ministerial Archive Service).
A sample of approximately 6,000 images, relating to issues and subjects related to aluminium, its applications, its industries, its history, and impact, can be consulted here.
Territory and Aluminium is a historical database project developed with the support of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.
It presents records relating to the main French sites producing raw aluminium, closed or still in operation (history, industrial development, data on companies currently operating).
The digitization and cataloguing of documents within these digital tools is carried out with the support of IHA partners.
The Créalu project (Creation and Aluminium - from the discovery of aluminium an industrial material to its creation as a historical object: invention, innovation, 19th-20th century markets), supported by the National Research Agency, not only made it possible to finance the development of the Digital Library, but also the digitization and cataloguing of the Revue de l'aluminium .
The Digital Icon Library, for its part, has received support from the Inter-ministerial Service of the Archives of France (SIAF) for its development and enrichment.
