The National Library of France provides a public data service that includes metadata from over 13.8 million publications in its collections. Researchers and developers can access this data through various APIs and use it for projects like analyzing gender trends in historical fiction writing or building apps that allow users to search for concert recordings based on the musical works performed. The library aims to enhance these services over time by expanding the available datasets and APIs, as well as providing resources for data and code sharing to support digital humanities and other reuse of the cultural data.

1. YOUR IDEAS, OUR DATA
Towards a public data service at the National
Library of France

2. The Approach: Building a Portal
for our Service Portfolio
Opened 2017 -11-23
http://api.bnf.fr
Different datasets,
Different ways to use them
One portal to bind them all
Built for the 2nd BnF Hackathon
Formats : XML, JSON, RDF
Data available through dumps
and APIs
Now: robust services for data
reuse (unlimited use)
2018:
- Towards a space for code
and data sharing
- Towards an API manager

3. Metadata from the BnF
Mission: collect, preserve and describe all publications disseminated
on the French territory since 1537
13.8 M publications
Books and serials
Movies
Albums
Music scores
Video games and software
Maps
Photographs and sketches
Beyond publications: authors, subjects, places related
to our collections
~2,1M authors, ~650k works, ~120k places, ~190k topics
(~CC-BY)
Described documents
(metadata)
Free
Digital documents
(metadata + data)
Digital documents
(metadata + data)

4. An Example for Digital Humanists
Gender studies: evaluate the proportion of women
writers for fiction
Pierre-Carl Langlais
http://scoms.hypotheses.org

5. An Example for Literature Teachers
Foster women writers : find contemporaries of Pierre de Ronsard
https://resultats.hypotheses.org/1048http://george2etexte.free.fr

6. And more…
Book commenting
https://www.babelio.com
You went to a concert? Find out recordings, musical
scores, press reviews of the work
http://auconcert.adimasc.io/#/work/13920002

7. Data from the Digital Library
~4.3M publications in Gallica: books, serials, manuscripts, maps,
images, music scores, audio media, video, ebooks…
Published with a wide range of APIs giving access to all facets
of digital objects through standardized protocols
Searching in digital data stores: OAI-PMH, SRU, SPARQL…
Accessing to content: image (IIIF), Text, OCR, ToC…
For professionals, researchers, digital humanists, makers…
http://gallica.bnf.fr

8. Examples: Digital Humanities
Mining the Heritage Newspapers Collection
for Research purposes
• Topic modeling
• Articles recognition
Text & OCR API
Le Journal des débats politiques et littéraires, July 27, 1837
Pierre-Carl Langlais, http://scoms.hypotheses.org/

9. Examples: Digital Humanities
Mining the Heritage Newspapers Collection
for Research purposes
• Natural language processing
(i.e. named entities
recognition, virality of text)
Text & OCR API
French and Canadian newspapers virality, XIXth c.
Pierre-Carl Langlais, http://scoms.hypotheses.org/

10. Examples: Digital Humanities
• Topic Modeling
• Articles Recognition
• Natural Language Processing
• Data Mining
Data mining (i.e. looking
for illustrations)
OCR & IIIF APIs
Mining the Heritage Newspapers Collection
for Research purposes

11. Examples: Apps
Mining Gallica Contents to Build New Apps
• Hackathon 2016: GallicaCarte
(geo-location of documents)
All APIs
http://gallicastudio.bnf.fr

12. Examples: Apps
Mining Gallica Contents to Build New Apps
• Hackathon 2017: MusiViz
(dataviz of music pieces)
All APIs
http://gallicastudio.bnf.fr

13. Examples: Apps
Mining Gallica Contents to Build New Apps
• Deep learning approach
for illustrations
classification and CBIR
(Content Based Image
Retrieval)
• Hybrid search
(metadata + text + CBIR)
All APIs
http://gallicastudio.bnf.fr

14. Help us Enhance our Services!
Contacts available on
http://api.bnf.fr
sebastien.peyrard at bnf.fr
jean-philippe.moreux at
bnf.fr
stephane.pillorget at bnf.fr