Digital libraries: National Library of France revamps online search

The National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France) has revamped the search engine for its online library, Gallica.

Launched in 1997, today the website of Gallica http://gallica.bnf.fr/ offers access to more than 1,3 million digitized documents, around 273 thousand books, 21 thousand maps, at least 10 thousand manuscripts, as well as images, periodicals, scores and sound recordings. Last year, Bibliothèque nationale de France announced a long term partnership with compatriot IT services suppler Atos Origin, which is to help the library to digitise its archive.

To ensure broad adoption of this rich resource by the public, and to ensure the long-term survivability of the cultural heritage Gallica embodies, the BnF signed an agreement with Exalead, global provider of search and information access software for the enterprise and the Web, which offered to the library a new search platform. Advanced linguistic and semantic features, ability to index unstructured data, high performance, and flexibility are among the strong points that lead the BnF to make this choice.