Collected Name Resources from LoARs (2010-present)

Articles from Juliana de Luna, Lillia de Vaux, and Alys Mackyntoich

June 2014 - Lillia de Vaux Link to LoAR Cover Letter

This month, I am covering Gallica, the online site for the Bibliothèque nationale de France (http://gallica.bnf.fr). This site includes digitized books, manuscripts, and prints from within and after our period. Some are simple scans, particularly the older, handwritten manuscripts, and others allow full text searching. The site is available in French, German, English, Spanish, and Portuguese, and is especially useful for locating French, Italian, and Latin language documents.

To search using the (mostly) English version of the site, click on the link called Advanced Search next to the search field. From here, users can specify their search parameters, such as the date range, where in the document a search term must be found, the desired language, and the type of document. To cast the widest net, I typically use the top search field for my search term, change the location to Text, and add a final publishing date of 1650.

Once you have searched for something, you see thumbnails of the resulting documents on the right and additional search filters in the left pane. The right pane gives information on the document such as whether it has fully indexed text, as well as a link to the full bibliographic record (Detailed information). Once you open a document, there is a vertical bar on the left called Module de recherche. Clicking on the small arrow there opens a pop-up that allows searching within a document for the text you want, as well as providing links to the pages with the desired text. If full text search is not available for that document (i.e., it is just an image of each page, with no OCR), this is stated in the pop-up. In addition, there are buttons to allow zooming and navigation within the document. The Detailed information link near the upper right gives the title, author, publication date and location, and other information.

Permanent links to the document and the page of interest are available at the bottom of the page, and these URLs can be copied and pasted into the documentation for a submission. You can also take a screenshot or just download a document or portion of a document. To download, click on the Download/Print link near the upper right, select options like the file type, and hit the Envoyer ("Send") button. A link to the downloaded file will be provided in a new tab or browser window.