About us

New media and technologies were supposed to take a large part in this “library of a new kind” aimed by the President François Mitterrand in 1988.  The outlines of a virtual library project, accessible from the Library's reading rooms, was then laid out:  users through computerized reading workstations would have access to a selection of copyrighted and royalty-free materials. These items would become the “virtual library of the honest man”. At the opening of the new building, in 1995, a total of 100 000 documents and 300 000 images were available.

In the 90’s, the Web's parallel emergence, its fast rise and rapid democratization were a game changer for the project: the BnF digital library would have a free and open access online. Gallica was launched in late 1997, with a few thousand texts available in image-mode only.
In 2000 a new version of Gallica is launched offering an access to both images and documents in text-mode. In order to ease the research process, different topics are created, offering a structured access to the digital collections.

In 2004, the first collection management policy is issued to set guidelines for the collection development. The collection included at the time about 100 000 printed items, 80 000 images and 30 hours of recorded sounds and music. The thematic scope of the collection was then History, French Literature and Sciences & technologies. The items were mostly in French and featured books, journals, newspapers, scores, prints, maps, photographs, sound recordings) from Antiquity to the first half of the 20th century, but most of them issued in the 19th century.

In January 2005, Jean-Noël Jeanneney (then President of the BnF) launched the project for a European digital library to counterbalance Google Books. It is new era for Gallica, the sharp increase of digitization explains this massive change of scale. Since 2006, several separate digitization procurement contracts are launched and permalinks are also introduced to provide permanent and stable access to each item. Between 2013 and 2023, Gallica grows from 3 to 10 million items.

A collective library

Since 2009, the French national Library (BnF) has been conducting an active policy of cooperation with public libraries all over the French territory. The aim of this policy is to promote the printed, written and graphic heritage preserved in French libraries.

The BnF supports the digitization of the cultural heritage collections of French libraries to enriching online collection in a rational way, and according to a policy of documentary completeness with digitized heritage resources from the digital national collections. These digital collections are made available free of charge on Gallica’s website and on any other digital library interoperable with Gallica.

In 2024, Gallica’s partner network includes almost 300 partners of all types:
- local partners (local libraries and archives, regional cooperation structures, learned societies) ;
- higher education and research partners ;
- other partners (mainly libraries or specialized associations, with a variety of statuses and a wide range of supervisory bodies).

Gallica marque blanche ("White Label")

Some of Gallica’s partners are white labels. “Gallica white label” is a cooperative scheme aimed at institutions that have digitized or wish to digitize part of their collections, but do not have their own digital library or wish to renew theirs.

Each project covers the creation of a digital library based on the Gallica infrastructure, but configured and customized according the partner's design.
In 2024, there are 18 Gallica white-label libraries:

Gallica Intra muros

Gallica intra muros is the enhanced version of Gallica, with a restricted access from the reading rooms of the BnF sites. In addition to Gallica's free resources, around 2 million items of copyright-protected content digitized by the BnF and its partners are available. Those items are labeled in the list of results “sous droits” (under copyright).

Conditions of use and reproduction

Most of the content available on Gallica consists of digital reproductions of works in the public domain from the BnF collections.
Non-commercial re-use of digitized documents is free of charge, provided that the source of documents is acknowledged as “Source gallica.bnf.fr / Bibliothèque nationale de France”.
Commercial re-use of digitized documents is subject to a license fee.

Commercial and non-commercial use of documents from partner libraries is managed by each partner.