Gallica wrapper

Gallica wrapper

Basics of Gallica API

ARK identifier

ARK (Archival Resource Key) is a unique identifier for any resource. It has for goal of creating a strong link between its id and the object. It works on the following principle:

• Responsibility of the organization for permanent access to its resources.
• Possibility to add a suffix to interrogate on the metadata of the resource.
• Opacity of its ID so that it never needs to be changed even if new properties of the resource arise.
• Complete control on all published IDs to ensure no duplicates.

An ARK has the following form: ark:/12148/bpt6k205233j, where

• ark: is the scheme
• 12148 is the Name Assigning Authority Number (NAAN), a unique number given to each institution by the California Digital Library (CDL). This particular number is the one of the BNF.
• bpt6k205233j the ARK name which is the identifier to the resource of the institution of the NAAN.

ARK is the ID scheme used at the BNF and is thus used in the wrapper to identify periodical and documents. For more information on the usage of ARK a the BNF c.f. this page

Document API

The Document API allows finding information on periodicals and on documents.

Periodical

The API gives all the years and dates of their publication as well as the ARKs of the documents.

Documents

The API gives metadata of the document under the form of an OAI XML that gives dublin core properties. These properties contain many valuable information, such as authors, dates, subjects, etc.

The API can also be used to find the pagination of a document, which in turn can give access to its OCR under the XML ALTO format and its IIIF images.

Search API

Gallica offers a research API that uses the SRU norm. The details will not be explicit here but can be found on this Gallica page (in french).

It is directly used in the main Gallica website, thus by observing the URL when doing a search, it is possible to infer the corresponding API call. The results are paginated up to 50 records per page (15 by default), it is thus necessary to handle the pagination.