French Contemporary Music Archive

This site I just ran into looks quite useful, I'll let them explain...,

The gateway to contemporary music resources in France is a specialized search engine for art music from 1945 to this day. Simple or advanced searches allow one to find and localize resources made available by the French partners of the gateway: documents (books, periodicals, music scores, commercial and archival sound recordings, films, program notes, documentary files, music databases…), events (concerts, festivals, conferences, courses…), addresses (of people and organizations). It is thus possible to find rapidly which library holds documents about a specific music work (recordings, scores, analyses…), where and when it will be performed in a live concert, how to contact the composer or a performer and to read their biographies. Many sound excerpts of heretofore unpublished archives are available online.

This gateway has been made possible with grants from the French Ministère de la culture et de la communication and Sacem to the founding partners.

Add to that this more recent news...,

2/16/09 : over 2000 excerpts from the sound archives of the Ensemble inter­con­temporain went online and are accessible via this gateway. • 2/2/09 The records of the contemporary music holdings of the Conservatoire national supérieur musique et danse de Lyon have integrated the gateway.

A good research tool by the looks of it, perhaps even more respect is due to the French taxpayer (what with their generous funding of contemporary music and all, e.g. IRCAM)