The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF, National Library of France) holds heritage assets collected over the last 500 years through legal deposit and an active policy of acquisitions: 14 million books and printed items, periodicals, manuscripts, prints, photographs, maps and plans, sheet music, coins, medals, audio documents, video, multimedia documents, sets and costumes. Its archives grow by around 150,000 items per year, covering the full range of intellectual, artistic and scientific disciplines.

It conserves, analyses, classifies and organises these treasures in order to make them available to the public, for research or general knowledge purposes.

It publicises them by organising exhibitions, conferences, talks and publishing works.

In addition to its reading rooms, which welcome more than 940,000 people every year, the BnF provides access to more than 1.5 million documents via the Gallica digital library.

It is also at the heart of the national network for cooperation between libraries, and it runs an international exchange and cooperation scheme.

A dynamic institution that is open to the challenges of the future, BnF is developing projects to give it a new dimension, thereby helping to increase its influence and its leading role in taking on the major cultural challenges of tomorrow: the legal deposit of Internet documents, the development of on-line digital libraries (Gallica and its upgrade Gallica 2) and the mass digitisation of its collections.

Address(es)
Quai François-Mauriac
75706 Paris Cedex 13
France
T +33 (0)1 537 959 59

www.bnf.fr/