Digitization at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, including an interview

The Bibliotheque nationale de France (BnF) is the national library of France and is located in Paris. It is intended to be the repository of all that is published in France and is a public establishment under the supervision of the Ministry of Culture. Its mission is to build collections – especially copies of works published in France that must, by law, be deposited there – to conserve them, and make them available to the public. ‘Gallica’, the digital library for online users, was established in 1997. In early 2011, the BnF announced plans to digitize and make available for sale online a corpus of 500,000 books within five years. This article provides an overview of the digitization work of the BnF and features an interview with Bruno Delorme, International Sales Director of Jouve Group, the company tasked with this huge digitization undertaking.