Keeping off the subject of today’s rail and power strikes (since everyone else has done it to death)
I caught the tail end of an interview on France Inter this morning with Bruno Racine, the president of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. He was just announcing a new version of the much maligned Gallica, the initiative launched a couple of years back to digitalise a large part of the BNF’s collection of books and documents and make them available on-line. The original Gallica, rather like the similarly criticised Galileo, the pan-European satellite navigation system, was a deeply Chiraquian venture: both were conceived as bold European initiatives (copying existing American technologies) so that when war (between Europe and America) comes, as it was felt inevitably it must, the Europeans would a) be able to read ancient books and b) be able to travel without maps. Gallica, the brain-child of the then president of the BNF Jean-Noël Jeanneney, was in fact seen as a direct rival to Google books. Jeanneney was horrified by the idea that the American world view would not only dominate every other, but future generations would only have that as their source and inspiration. He particularly took against the anglo-saxon view of the French Revolution which, from Dickens to Schama, passing by the “Scarlet Pimpernel”, has concentrated on the Terror and not on the Rights of Man.
When I interviewed M. Jeanneney in May 2006, he was hugely optimistic about the technical brilliance of Gallica. I remember protesting rather feebly that on my PC I could never get beyond the facsimile title page, which he didn’t hear as a criticism of his system but as an admission of my inadequacies. From the moment I filed my France Profonde I never looked at Gallica again. So it was a surprise this morning to hear the new BNF president churning out the same optimism for Gallica 2. The interviewer seemed deeply bored by the subject and just as sceptical. His intonation gave the impression he was doing the interview under duress, because his boss had told him public radio has some sort of obligation to broadcast the ideas of the president of the national library. “How much will Gallica 2 cost? 4 million euro a year. “Who’s paying for it?” unable to conceal the rhetorical nature of the question. “The state,” replied the BNF proudly.
In fact Gallica 2 looks far better than its predecessor – it even seems to sense that my PC is English because it opens on an English page. Only the Beta version is running at the moment, and will be added to almost daily over the next few years. You can search by character, for a particular work, a topic, a place or under themes such as biology or whatever. I typed in “Montaigne” and got 462 results – 19th century biographies and studies mainly, which look as though they would only interest the thesis writer, as well of course as different editions of the Essays. I couldn’t see anything as modern as Alain Juppé’s biography of him, presumably because it’s under copyright. Typing in “Emma Bovary” gave only 11 answers, including the catalogue of the 1980 centenary exhibition. The idea is the same as Gallica 1, you read a facsimile page, so you can’t scroll quickly but have to plod page by page – but then you have that delightfully olde worlde feeling of reading a real book (off the screen). The themes are not up to much at the moment – go to the Discovery page, click on any subject and every time all I got was “No documents were found for your search”. This is nothing to do with Gallica 2, you understand, it’s clearly me being inadequate - probably my English way of clicking or something.
November 14th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
I’ve been using Gallica for the past two years, working on the later 19th century. I gush about it all the time. It makes things available from my living room, immediately, that I would otherwise have to wait weeks for the library to possibly deliver. In a few minutes, I can see how the definition of a word changes across two hundred years of dictionnaires de l’academie francaise. Whole runs of journals from the 1880s and 1890s that I need for my dissertation work are on gallica. i look forward to the second iteration.
November 15th, 2007 at 9:40 am
I didn’t mean to imply Gallica 1 has no use - it is clearly excellent for 19th century studies, and I am glad to hear they have sorted out whatever bugs they had at the beginning. So far, though, I have not found very much useful early 20th century material (I’m looking at colonial administration in the 1930’s) or 17th, 16th, 15th or 14th century documents. I hope with time they will add that sort of thing.
One thing I forgot to add yesterday, to anyone interested, is that Gallica 2 has books in English too - not many, but in the 400-odd items on Montaigne there are some early works in English. Interesting because I have often thought he was as important in England (cf Shakespeare) as in France (cf Michel Onfray)
November 18th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
I want to defend Gallica for its contents. There are superb, and there is a wealth of texts of great interest there. But I agree it is enormously cumbersome. As I travel a lot, I have purchased a Sony Reader for e-books , very nice to carry a lot of downloads , but it does not take the pdf files ( or it takes them only for hypermyopic people), and when you want to read a Gallica piece, such as , say Huysmans ‘ A rebours, it is useless. So we have to turn to Michael Crichton or Ruth Wendell or Dan Brown, who are in big characters , and very readable. But I wish I could read Simenon on e-books… Maigret would disapprove, I suppose.