Documents available online

Gallica makes it possible to find sources that are rare, unusual, out-of-print, or difficult, if not impossible, to access.

These materials are royalty-free and available free of charge when used strictly for private purposes.

Today, this digital library includes more than 75,000 volumes of digitized texts, 70,000 still images, and 30 hours of sound recordings.

 

Gallica contains digitized printed materials in both image and text formats: the image format, a photographic facsimile of the original, preserves the visual appearance of the original document; the text format results from the manual typing of the document and allows you to search for terms within the text.

About 1,250 works in text format have been placed online through a collaboration with the French National Institute for the French Language (Institut National de la Langue Française / INALF), which is an institution of French National Center for Scientific Research (Centre national de la recherche scientifique / CNRS), and the three multimedia publishing houses Bibliopolis, Acamédia, and Honoré Champion.

Gallica offers three types of access:

• "Recherche" ("Search") allows you to browse the catalog listing all of Gallica's materials,
• "Découverte" ("Discover") offers you a broad view of various thematic presentations found in the online collections, and
• "Dossiers" ("Presentations") gives you access to the thematic presentations described in "Discover."

"Recherche" makes it possible to search traditionally by title, author, and subject. In addition, you can combine these criteria with a key word search of the text (table of contents, captions, etc.) and specify the type of document you are looking for (text format, monographs, periodicals, still images, sound recordings, and manuscripts).

With "Découvert," you can search chronologically, placing various documents in their historical contexts.

 

The catalogue général de la BnF lists all the digital collections of BnF and gives direct access to Gallica materials.

Among BnF's selection of electronic periodicals, certain titles are available on the Internet for free, giving full access to all their articles.

For electronic periodicals to which BnF has a subscription, you can read abstracts and summaries online.