National French Library (Bibliothèque Nationale de France) – music department: Interview with Mr. Sébastien Gaudelus “Retrospective conversion project manager”

What is the role of the music department of the BNF?

Mr. Sébastien Gaudelus: The music department is one of the collection departments of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and has one of the most important content, by its volume, diversity and presiosity.

The music patrimony contains 2 million documents whether handwritten and printed music, books, periodicals, letters or musicians’ archives. For example, we conserve some of the first printed music, as well as handwritten ones by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, Debussy, Messiaen … Researchers and musicians from all over the world come daily to consult these documents.

Why had you chosen to work with Jouve for this conversion?

Mr. Sébastien Gaudelus: A large part of the references to our documents is only accessible using a card-based catalogue, built over a number of years, which can be consulted in our reading room. The goal of this project is to obtain all the information contained on these cards in digital format, which will then be accessible online through the BNF’s general catalogue, BN-Opale Plus.

What were the starting difficulties and your specific requirements?

Mr. Sébastien Gaudelus: The size of the catalogue was the first difficulty to take into account: 900,000 cards stored in more than 600 drawers! Its age and history were others, which manifest themselves through different written forms, presentations and sorting methods.

From the heterogeneity of the data to be captured, the result must be structured in a homogeneous way so as to be understood by the researchers whether consulting online or in the library with the multi-support catalogue.

However, some document descriptions, specific to the music department, had to be conserved as-is: precise details of musical pieces presented in the tomes, disposition of periodical articles …

Concerning all these technical requirements, Jouve answered positively point-by-point, especially for the data capture of non-Latin characters (Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, Chinese, Arab, Japanese).

What did you most benefit from in this collaboration?

Mr. Sébastien Gaudelus: The close collaboration between the music department and Jouve’s technical department allowed the modification of the data processing and continually improvement of the content, and this right from the first phases of specifications. The final result will give access to a rich bibliography of 600,000 easy-to-consult notices.