Bibliothèque nationale de France 'Shared Heritage' collections online

The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF - National Library of France) has launched an online collection of documents 'Shared Heritage'. This new digital collection of BnF and its partners gives access to visual, manuscript and printed material connecting France with countries around the world. Users can now consult collections for France-Japan, France-China and France-Poland, while France-VietNam opens later in 2019 and France-India will be accessible in 2020.

It is the ambition of the collection "Shared heritage" to collect outstanding documents bearing witness to the relations between France and the world, in order to make them accessible everywhere and to all and to put them in context thanks to the latest researches findings as well.

Diplomatic, commercial, scientific and cultural exchanges compose the very fabric of the relations between France and many countries around the world, a shared history ripe with convergences and tensions. Thousands of manuscript or printed pages, photographs, prints, posters and maps, scattered among many institutions, testify to the wealth and fruitfulness of these exchanges.

The BnF and its partners in France and abroad take these unique documents from their collections and digitize them to introduce them in a new collection of thematic websites. In order To better understand them, the best French and foreign specialists have been solicited to highlight these sources by their analyzes.