More than 200,000 documents on the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) website are now available in the public domain for private and commercial use. The royalty-free documents can be used to illustrate a family history or social media page or create a website.
The photos, postcards, posters, books, magazines, newspapers, maps, musical scores, newspapers and sound recordings, that BAnQ digitized a while ago, are now easy to find through one portal.
Until now, people who wanted to use any of these documents had to make a request to BAnQ where an employee would have to go through the process to find out if document was royalty-free. That is no longer the case with this assembled collection.
BAnQ’s collection of royalty-free documents is expected to grow over the years as new documents are identified and/or digitized.
Identifying royalty-free images is part of a worldwide trend where institutions, such as the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the New York Public Library, have made it easier to use images and documents in the public domain.
Jean-François Palomino, a mapmaker and coordinator for BAnQ’s heritage collections research, told L’Actualité magazine, “For the moment, we have digitized between two and 20 percent of our physical documents.”
Exploring the public domain collection
The royalty-free documents are in eight categories. Cartes postales/Postcards, Photographies/Photographs, Livres/Books, Affiches/Posters, Cartes géographiques/maps, Partitions musicales/Musical scores, Enregistrements sonore/Sound recordings, and Revues et journaux/Magazines and newspapers.
For genealogists, one of the more interesting collections is the postcards. There are more than 29,000 postcards in the public domain collection, and there is probably at least one postcard for most villages in Quebec.
In some cases, creative thinking may be required to produce the best search results. For example, to find posters used during the Second World War, the keyword, war, will find a few images, but the keyword, guerre, will find 166 in both English and French.
Choose the publication language
If you want to look at Livres (Books) that have been published in English, click on the plus sign next to Langue (Language) at the bottom of the filters on the right side of the web page to reveal the language choice, and select anglais (English). You can also narrow down the results by selecting a date or place (Lieu représenté).
To see more of your search results, click on the Afficher plus de résultats bar (Display more results) that appears at the bottom of the screen.
The royalty-free documents can be found on the BAnQ website.
To learn more about how to search the BAnQ website, read How to search historical newspapers online with Quebec Archives’ new search engine: Part 1.
