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Document
resources
A new research tool
Gallica partners
The Gallica web server
Gallica files
Practical information
Gallica 2000 is the latest version of the Bibliothèque nationale de France digital library, and contains multimedia documents spanning the entire period from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century. With 35 000 fixed images from different French collections, including those of the Bibliothèque nationale de France itself, 35 000 digitized printed volumes in image mode and one thousand titles in text mode, Gallica 2000 is one of the largest digital collections available free of charge on the worldwide electronic network. The Gallica project began in 1997, and was successively extended to include the Gallica Classique collection and the Proust File. The new Gallica 2000 interface has been totally redesigned and now provides access to tens of thousands of previously unpublished documents. The site will soon be expanded further to include some 15000 new out-of-copyright digitised titles. The current three-year plan will be adding Voyages en France (5000 titles), Utopies and Voyages en Afrique.
Gallica collections include reference material, rare editions, dictionaries, journals, bibliographies and outstanding images from Bibliothèque nationale de France collections, such as drawings by Louis Boullée and Jean-Jacques Lequeue (Prints and Photographs Department), the Eugène Atget collection (also from Prints and Photographs), the Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville collection (Maps and Plans Department), the Music Department’s collection of portraits of musicians, the Basile collection (Coins, Medals and Antiquities) or illustrated works from the Rare Books Room. But users will also find material from external collections, such as illustrated works from the Musée de l’Homme and National Natural History Museum libraries, photographs from the archives of the Heritage and Architecture media library, or photographic material from press agency archives. Gallica covers a wide range of disciplines, including history, literature, science, philosophy, law, economics and political science. Although the main emphasis is on Francophone culture, classic works from other countries are also available, in their original language or in translation. Gallica thus offers a broad selection of essays, guides, novels, poetry, reference material and lesser known works to help everyone, from browsers to book lovers and from college students to academics, to further their knowledge of a historical epoch through contemporary political, philosophical, scientific or literary issues.
Gallica 2000 includes a catalogue listing all digitized documents held by the BnF, whether in copyright or not. However, only documents that are listed as out of copyright may be consulted. The catalogue allows users to navigate through the entire corpus of documents and to consult contents pages and journals in text mode, as well as the legends to pictures. The documents all have accompanying topic-based editorial texts, chronologies and lists of other relevant sites to help you make the most of Gallica's resources.
The corpus of fixed images has been greatly enriched thanks to cooperative programmes with many different public and private institutions, including the Musée de l'Homme library, the central library of the National Natural History Museum, the Heritage and Architecture media library or the library of the Higher School of Civil Engineering (Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées). The Orsay University and Ecole Polytechnique libraries and the Henri Ey library at the Sainte Anne teaching hospital have also made valuable contributions to Gallica from their science collections. The documents in text mode are contributions from the Frantext database managed by INALF (Institut national de la langue française) and from cooperative programmes with the publishers Acamédia, Bibliopolis and Honoré Champion.
The new Gallica 2000 version is the product of a major technological advance which has totally integrated the application with the Bibliothèque nationale de France archiving and electronic document searching systems. Not all of the 15 million pages available on line are stored in fast access disks : some of the material is stored in juke-boxes which require longer wait times, while the most frequently requested documents are loaded into fast-access cache memories.
The Gallica web server provides access to the catalogue, which manages access rights and selects documents that are out of copyright. These are called up from the archiving system and presented to the user.Besides extracting whole documents from storage units, the system will also
search for individual page numbers. Documents may also be accessed through the
editorial pages providing topic-based information and chronologies.
Text images are displayed in PDF*** through Acrobat Reader software, which users
can download free of charge from the Gallica site.
Documents may also be downloaded in full or in part in PDF or TIFF*** formats.
Iconographic material is displayed in JPEG***.
Gallica
classique provides access to the works of authors who have been consecrated
in literary history as " Great French Writers ". The Gallica
classique collection covers one thousand texts - 700 in image mode and 300
in text mode - from Villon to Zola, including nearly one hundred volumes from
the celebrated Classiques Garnier collection, the complete works of Chateaubriand
and the Furne edition of La Comédie humaine. Thanks to its search
and navigation tools and accompanying user guide, the site is designed to meet
the needs of students, academics, researchers and browsers alike. The newly
designed server provides for intuitive access by author or by century, by placing
authors and their works within the context of major contemporary events.
This
file was created to coincide with an exhibition on Marcel Proust organised by
the BnF, and allows users to consult the manuscript Le Temps retrouvé,
the last volume of La Recherche du temps perdu. The manuscript, which
has been extracted from the library's Proust collection, is made up of six exercise
books which take the reader into the heart of the author's creative process,
with numerous examples illustrating the atypical composition of the novel. Readers
may also consult the text of the original 1927 edition in text mode, a contribution
to Gallica from the publisher Honoré Champion. These precious documents
are accompanied by a chronology and descriptions of the memories, places and
people making up the author's world.
Recording the spoken word for posterity was one of the major concerns of the inventors of the phonograph in 1877-1878. In this folder, Gallica presents a corpus of acoustic recordings from the time before microphones and " electric " recording equipment came onto the scene in 1925. These recordings include the Archives de la parole and an anthology from the Historical documents series published by Pathé which reproduces French politicians' speeches during the First World War (Discours d'hommes politiques français durant la première guerre mondiale).
Definitions :
* Image mode produces a visual facsimile of the original document.
**Text mode is produced by entering the document in digital form, and allows
users to search for individual terms in the text.
***TIFF, PDF and JPEG : document saving formats allowing images to be exported
Bibliothèque nationale de France
User services and networks directorate
Digital library department
Quai François Mauriac
75706 Paris Cedex 13
Internet sites :
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