Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The Bibliothèque nationale du Québec (BNQ) is the Crown corporation acting as the national library of Quebec. Its mission, defined by law B-2.2, An Act respecting the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, is "to assemble, preserve permanently and disseminate Quebec's published documentary heritage together with any related document of cultural interest, and documents relating to Quebec that are published outside Quebec", as well as "to offer democratic access to Quebec's national documentary heritage, culture and knowledge and to act as catalyst in relation to Quebec documentary institutions, thus contributing to the personal development of citizens". The BNQ receives approximately M$16 yearly financing and is obligated by law to offer access to all its collections for free to everybody.It was created on 12 August 1967 thanks to the collections and assets of the Saint-Sulpice library, whose birth dates to 1910. The general collection of reference works is still located in the historical Beaux-Arts building of the old Saint-Sulpice library, which was erected in 1915 on Rue Saint-Denis, in the centre of Montreal. Most of the 240,000 books in the general collection though are currently in the new head office and preservation centre, opened in 1997 in the premises of a disused factory, on Rue Holt, in Rosemont, Montreal. An additional collection of over 55,000 government publications is mostly hosted on Rue de l'Esplanade, in front of the Mont-Royal park.
Most of those documents, along with all of the central branch of Montreal's public library's collections, following an agreement between those institutions, are now being relocated in the new Grande bibliothèque du Québec (GBQ) building due open 23 April 2005 in time for the World Book and Copyright Day. This new library, a M$90.6 project by Patkau from Vancouver and Croft-Pelletier/Gilles Guité from Quebec City, under construction since 2001, will make approximately four millions documents, among which one million books, more freely available to the general public. The GBQ will be located on Boulevard de Maisonneuve, in the heart of University of Quebec's campus.Among other BNQ's tasks since 1979 is to assign ISBNs prefixes in 1st group identifier "2" to all French publishers in Canada and all non-English publishers in Quebec. As a successful incentive towards the use of ISBN, the government of Quebec has made all monographs bearing an ISBN provincial sales tax-free since 1991. The BNQ also publishes a monthly bibliography since 1969, and has published as well an extensive 26-volume bibliography covering the period between 1821 and 1967, when legal deposit was established. The library catalogue, IRIS, has been available online since 1994.
The president and general director of the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec is Lise Bissonnette, a respected author and journalist. She is seconded by four general directors:
- Claude Fournier, preservation (including acquisitions)
- Hélène Roussel, diffusion (including cataloguing)
- Robert St-Jean, information technologies
- Monique Goyette, administration
See also
- Archives nationales du Québec
- Library and Archives Canada
External link
- Official Website (French, with English summary)
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