Information resources and technologies provider ProQuest, US, and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) in Paris are joining forces to expand access to the Library's rich historical treasures. As part of its Early European Books programme, ProQuest will digitise about 70,000 volumes from BnF's collection of European books printed before 1700. The collection, which is world renowned for its breadth and quality, includes 3,000 works printed before 1501, providing researchers with simple, online insight into early European history and culture.
The BnF's collection is vast and wide-ranging, containing many rare or obscure texts on subjects from literature and history to science and engineering, from law to aesthetics and art criticism, from politics to philosophy and theology. The books themselves come in many forms, with popular chapbooks (which were widely distributed but rarely preserved) at one end of the spectrum and luxury editions aimed at a wealthy, courtly audience at the other.
The BnF is the fifth major library to participate in ProQuest's Early European Books. The company launched the initiative with the Danish Royal Library, Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in Italy. Digitisation operations are currently also underway at the National Library of the Netherlands and at the Wellcome Library in London. In each case, ProQuest has set up a scanning studio on site at the library and uses state-of-the-art technology to create high-definition colour images of every page, including the often-lavish bindings and covers.
Through the Early European Books project, ProQuest is building an increasingly comprehensive survey of printing in Europe to 1700 by digitising and bringing together the holdings of major rare book libraries.
Early European Books collections are available for purchase by libraries worldwide and are delivered via a multilingual interface which allows powerful searching of the detailed indexing, as well as cross-searching of the well-known Early English Books Online database, with its facsimiles of 125,000 books printed in English or in the British Isles between 1473 and 1700. Books from the Bibliothèque nationale de France will be included in a number of Early European Books collections, starting with the newly released Collection IV.
