Featured Resource: Gallica Digital Library
Posted on Tue, Oct 11, 2011
This week’s featured resource is the Gallica Digital Library, the official digital resource of the French National Library. An ambitious project well over 10 years in the making, Gallica seeks to broadly digitize French culture for contemporary readers and researchers. The site offers simple and advanced search of a database of over 1,500,000 documents including manuscripts, rare book editions, journals, news articles, maps, scientific and mathematical documents, and sound recordings.
Relevance for Prior Art
The central mission of Gallica is to preserve culture, meaning that novels, poetry, original musical scores, drawings, and other art-related materials can be found in the library. In addition, the site's users include students and academics in humanities fields. A variety of other indexes rounds out the collection to make Gallica a fine resource for finding non-patent literature in prior art search. The technical indexes include mathematical resources and contemporary francophone academic articles from all fields of study, as well as a wide array of textbooks.
Language Accessibility
Most of the document text is in French, or has been translated to French from the original language. The site and search functions, however, are available in English, Spanish and Portuguese. The advanced search function is also available by language for nine languages including Chinese and Latin. According to an interview with Frederic Martin of Gallica, a main credential frequently searched for in texts selected for digitization is OCR compatibility. Therefore, many of the books and articles available on Gallica are text-readable. This means that Google Translate may be useful to non-French speaking Researchers if a relevant full-text document is found in French.
Copyright Accessibility
The resources for which the full-text is available are usually from the public domain, or else are the result of an agreement between the French National Library and the individual copyright holder. To complement these primary resources, Gallica search provides access to metadata and excerpts from millions more documents currently under copyright, through special agreements with publishers, which can help in guiding further research.
Continuing Progress
As of 2010, the project averaged 1500 scans per day, and frequent blog updates detailing interesting additions to the digital library indicate that the continuing growth of the project is as vital as ever. In fact, this spring, Gallica announced that it has partnered with Exalead, a leading search and information access provider, with the goal of improving its infrastructure.
To learn more about this resource, please check out Intellogist's community report, the Gallica blog, and the video interview with Frederic Martin quoted in this post.
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