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At the BnF the moment of glory for the butterfly

Butterflies drawn by Émile-Allain Séguy in 1925. Emil Allain Seguy

Twenty-five years after its creation, the Gallica digital library has reached the milestone of ten million documents accessible online, with an illustrated work dating back to 1925.

With a flight of butterflies drawn in 1925 by Émile-Allain Séguy, a prolific Art Nouveau and Art Deco painter and decorator, Gallica celebrated the milestone: ten million documents digitized and accessible, free online.

Like the lottery, his work butterflies hit the jackpot after queuing for documents to be scanned (600 scans per day) to finish in the 10 millionth. The album embodies a happy and seductive image that the BnF wants to convey when it comes to talking about online resources.

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When this institution started the project 25 years ago, people were still talking about “the honest man’s library”, the idea of offering everyone access to essential scientific sources. The black and white classics of literature came to mind, old gazettes that weren’t very fancy, or even a few grimoires in Latin intended for a limited community of researchers. They are still there, but there are also many pictures coming in every day “Who is the challenge of tomorrow”says Sophie Bertrand, the head of Gallica at the BnF.

“Gallica is best known to researchers, but over the years its use has expanded to include amateurs hungry for oddities, from young stylists to apprentice cooks. Digital heritage is often reduced to books, but it feeds on all technologies.”, she continues. Video games will appear on Gallica by the end of the year. We can even play it, I promise.

Promote the visibility of these monumental collections

Therefore, in this first French-language online library, we will find (almost) everything that does not hesitate to put the wolf in the old sheepfold of knowledge. Artificial intelligence will be used for the first time in 2024, fed with hundreds of images and just as many shapes that make it possible to find, for example, an elephant, a sun or a butterfly in the collections.

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Today, this research is only accessible through written notices, which inevitably limits the number of finds. To increase it, the BnF has teamed up with the University Library of Strasbourg and the National Institute of Art History, who will also feed the Ogress AI. The “challenges of tomorrow” image will serve as a powerful lever to promote the visibility of these monumental collections. The fact is that there is still a lot to be done regarding the BnF collection: another 30 million documents are to be integrated into Gallica.