Butterflies drawn by Émile-Allain Séguy in 1925. Emile-Allain Seguy
Twenty-five years after its creation, the Gallica digital library has reached the milestone of ten million documents accessible online with an illustrated work from 1925.
It was with a flight of butterflies, those drawn in 1925 by Émile-Allain Séguy, a prolific painter and decorator of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, that Gallica celebrated the milestone: that of ten million digitized and accessible documents. free online.
As in the lotto, his work Butterflies hit the jackpot, having joined the queue of documents to be scanned (600 pass each day) to end up being the ten millionth. The album embodies a joyful and seductive image, the one that the BnF intends to put forward when it comes to talking about online resources.
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When this institution launched the project, twenty-five years ago, people were still talking about “the library of the honest man”, the idea of offering everyone access to essential academic sources. The black and white classics of literature came to mind, old gazettes that weren’t very fancy, or even a few grimoires in Latin intended for a restricted community of researchers. Those are still there, but also come in every day a lot of pictures “who are the challenge of tomorrow”says Sophie Bertrand, the head of Gallica at the BnF.
“Gallica is best known to researchers but, over the years, its use has spread to amateurs eager for curiosities, from young stylists to apprentice cooks, for example. Digital heritage is often reduced to books, yet it feeds on all technologies”, she continues. By the end of the year, video games will appear on Gallica. We can even play it, we promise.
Promote the visibility of these monumental collections
We therefore find (almost) everything on this first French-speaking online library which is not afraid to bring the wolf into the old sheepfold of knowledge. In 2024, artificial intelligence will be used for the first time, fed with hundreds of images and as many shapes that will allow users to find an elephant, a sun or a butterfly, for example, in the collections.
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Today, this research is only accessible by written notices, which necessarily limits the number of finds. To increase them, the BnF has joined forces with the Strasbourg University Library and the National Institute of Art History, which will also feed the ogress that is AI. The “challenges of tomorrow” image will serve as a powerful lever to promote the visibility of these monumental collections. The fact remains that, concerning the BnF collection, there is still a lot of work to do: another 30 million documents to be integrated into Gallica.