Data visualisations

Summary

Musical works and composers

Criteria for constituting the corpus of films and directors searchable by this data visualization tool imply several biases to be taken into account during a search.

BnF's general catalog consists of:

  • bibliographic records describing documents (for example, a musical score, a sound recording, a broadcast...)
  • authority records describing works or people; they can be used to link to other records relating to the original work or its author. Among these authority records, the uniform musical titles (TUM) describe musical works.

The corpus of musical works and composers is based strictly on uniform musical title (TUM) authority records. Only bibliographic records linked to these TUM authorities are included in the corpus.

In the general catalogue, not all bibliographic records for recordings, scores, broadcasts, etc. are yet linked to TUM authority records.

However, the data used to compile this corpus is intended to be gradually expanded.

Films and filmmakers

Criteria for constituting the corpus of films and directors searchable by this data visualization tool imply several biases to be taken into account during a search.
BnF's general catalog consists of:

  • bibliographic records describing documents (for example, a video cassette, a DVD edition containing several different works...);
  • authority records describing works or people; they can be used to link to other records relating to the original work or its author.

All bibliographic records are not yet associated with authority records.
This visualization tool provides a corpus of films and directors as follows:

  • directors are identified from bibliographic records where they are identified by a role code "restager" (0610), in intermarc 700.
  • work records are identified among Titles authorities and among works calculated using Robotdonnées. Film records are selected on the basis of data present in field 043 (Category of work) and in field 061 (Audiovisual works: form or genre), or by the mention “film” in the subfields 145$e or 145$f (Forme de l’œuvre).
    Among the latter, only works linked to a bibliographic record are included in the corpus, which excludes, for example, catalogued works for which BnF only holds a film poster or script and not the movies: https://data.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb16464526z. Works without a director are also excluded.

As a result, the searches carried out using this tool only cover a limited perimeter of the films in BnF's collections.
Data curation projects are currently underway, with the aim of replacing calculated works with full authority records, with harmonization scheduled for 2026. In addition, the initial corpus of authority records for titles will be progressively enriched.

It should also be noted that the referential systems currently used for certain levels of bibliographic description (such as genre or type of footage) are likely to evolve in order to refine the degree of precision of the search.

To complete the consultation of the visualization tool, the BnF's general catalog allows a full-text search, and thus the identification of works that have not yet been integrated in data.bnf.fr.

Works and authors from Quebec

The current data in the BnF catalogue does not allow for the specific isolation of Quebec creations.

The corpus of works and authors from Quebec is based on the following criteria:

  • authors (individuals and organisations) whose nationality is listed as Canada and whose language is French;
  • all works and editions related to these authors, regardless of their role.

Thus, the corpus of works and authors from Quebec includes editions of works by non-Quebec authors for which Quebec authors have served as preface writers, illustrators, translators, etc. For example, Fables by La Fontaine are included in the corpus because they were published in an edition illustrated by Mylène Villeuneuve, a Quebec author.

Locations in Quebec

The corpus of locations in Quebec is based on the various place pages found on data.bnf.fr.

The general catalogue includes:

  • authority records for places such as RAMEAU

In data.bnf.fr, these two types of place authority records are merged whenever possible: example.

These different types of location records are included in the Quebec location corpus, provided that they are linked to the Quebec geographical classification framework.

Internal alignments within data.bnf.fr make it possible to display, for each place in the corpus, all publications and authors linked to that place.