Multi-disciplinary at heart, as its goal requires, the CRLV gathers specialists of various literatures, historians, art historians and ethnologists. The CRLV studies travel literature in its various aspects: documentary, esthetic, and ideological. A great space is reserved for the Utopian fiction. The domain is thus bounded by texts spanning from simple travel journals to the extraordinary voyages. The CRLV is also interested in the French "Age Classique", yet it is not limited to it, being involved in the most "universal" background to be found in European scholarship.

A number of foreign scholars have trained and are being trained at the CRLV. International cooperative ties have been established with the CIRVI (Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca sul Viaggio in Italia) in Turin, Italy, the oldest center specializing in travel literature, with the Center for Neo-Hellenic Research (Centre de Recherches néo-helléniques) in Athens, and numerous French and foreign institutions, including the Institut de Recherche sur la Civilisation de l'Occident Moderne (IRCOM) of the Sorbonne, with which the CRLV organizes each year a seminar for a doctorate of troisième cycle. Moreover, every year, the CRLV organizes an international meeting at the "Fondation Clews" at the Château de La Napoule in southern France and has a scientific agreement with the Château de Grignan (Drôme) where since 2002 a young scholar has been given the Prix du Jeune Chercheur.

In the area of electronic production, the CRLV manages its own website where one can find a Répertoire des chercheurs, a biennial Lettre du voyageur of parallel literature, a database of travel literature and an audio encyclopedia containing the text of lectures and seminars of our meetings. A new program, a Collection of Travel-related Images (Répertoire d'Images Viatiques: RIVES) is expected to be on line by 2003. Our Forums are accessible to anyone who wishes to spread news related to these topics and a search engine allows anyone to locate such information.