URL:
Excerpt:
Digitisation of both printed books and graphic material is well under way. For technical and economic reasons, documents have been processed primarily in image mode to begin with. Most of the texts selected for digitisation are out-of-copyright material making up an encyclopaedic collection on the human and social sciences which includes original material, peer reviews, reference works and a collection of journals which are either major research references or difficult to find elsewhere. The 100000 digitised images are drawn from document collections held outside the Bibliothèque nationale de France and from patrimonial collections selected among its own departments. The digitised collections are distributed through the internal Bibliothèque nationale de France network, but once the various technical and legal problems involved in on-line communications have been resolved, all digitised documents will be available through the various "information highways".