BNF

The BNF stands for the French National Library (Bibliothèque nationale de France) and has for missions to collect, preserve, enrich and make available the national documentary heritage, as stated in the decree of creation n°94-3 of January the 3rd, 1994.

What is the legal deposit?

The BnF has various possibilities to enrich its collections; the major one is the legal deposit established by François 1st in 1537.

The legal deposit makes it possible to draw up the Bibliographie nationale française which registers all the documents listed above (except for the Internet), printed, published or disseminated in France.

A living Collection

The BnF’s collections are also enriched thanks to acquisitions. A major part of the institution’s budget is dedicated to these acquisitions, either regular – mainly to work out a reference collection in the field of foreign works – or prestigious and heritage acquisitions for which sponsorship may be necessary.

Cataloguing... what is it?

The BnF draws up catalogues that list all these resources. Actually, as the National Bibliographic Agency, it has to produce a reference catalogue that can be used to locate documents printed or disseminated in France. Bibliographic records and authority files for authors and groups, textual or musical titles, business items or references, are standardized as bibliographic products made available for other libraries that will then feed their own catalogues.

To preserve and to restore

Over the centuries, the BnF has developed appropriate techniques for its preservation (both preventive and curative) mission: attention paid to the state of collections and protection of collections, environmental conditions of stacks… Several workshops appropriate to the various types of documents and preservation techniques and a laboratory are available at the BnF.