Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec

The Bibliothèque nationale du Québec ( BNQ ) is the " Crown corporation", who carries out the mission of the National Library of Quebec. Your task is defined by law B- 2.2, An Act respecting the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, which reads:

The BNQ gets about $ 16 million annually for the financing and is obliged by law to provide free access to all collections.

It was founded on August 12, 1967, thanks to the collection and the assets of the Bibliothèque Saint- Sulpice, which was founded in 1910. The main part of the collection and anlehnende it works are still to be found in the historic Beaux- Arts building of the old Saint- Sulpice Library, 1915 in the Rue Saint -Denis, built in the center of Montreal. Nevertheless, there are most of the 240,000 books in the collection at the main office and preservation center, which was opened in 1997 in the buildings of a disused company in Rue Holt in Rosemont in the neighborhood of Montreal. An additional collection of more than 55,000 government publications is mainly housed in the Rue de l' Esplanade, opposite the Parc de Mont -Royal.

Most of these documents, together with the collections of the Central Library of Montreal's public libraries, are following an agreement between the two institutions merged in the new building of the Grande bibliothèque du Québec ( GBQ ), which on April 23, 2005 at the same time as World Book and Copyright Day will be opened. This new library, a 90.6 million dollar project by Patkau of Vancouver, British Columbia and Croft-Pelletier/Gilles Guite from Quebec, is under construction since 2001, and will contain about 4 million documents, including a million books, now more easily accessible to the general public. The GBQ will be located on the Boulevard de Maisonneuve, in the heart of the campuses of the Université du Québec à Montréal.

Another object of the BNQ is to register since 1979 ISBN, which in the first group included a two for all French publications in Canada and all non-English publications in Québec. In order to promote the use of the ISBN has local sales taxes for all publications that have an ISBN since 1991 abolished the government. Since 1696 The BNQ also publishes a monthly bibliography, as well as an extensive 26- volume bibliography, which covers the period 1821-1967, as the legal deposit has been introduced. The library catalog, IRIS, has been online since 1994.

The President and Director General of the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec is Lise Bissonnette, an acclaimed author and journalist. Your are subject to four Directors-General:

• Claude Fournier, conservation (including acquisition )
• Hélène Roussel, diffusion (including cataloging)
• Robert St- Jean, information technology
• Monique Goyette, management

More Canadian Libraries

• Archives nationales du Québec
• Library and Archives Canada