This week marks the 10th anniversary of the largest library in the French-speaking world, Quebec’s Grande Bibliothèque.
Located in the heart of Montreal’s Latin Quarter and just a block up the street from the Quebec Archives, the Grande Bibliothèque welcomes on average more than 45,000 visitors each week. Most days, there is a line-up before the doors open at 10:00 a.m.
The Grande Bibliothèque is the repository for all books published in Quebec.
Image courtesy of the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec.
Jacques Gagné, who has spent many hours conducting research at the Grande Bibliothèque, said there is much to be found there for genealogists.
The Collection nationale is the most comprehensive collection of resources from the earliest days of New France, and it includes the world’s largest collection of books and other documents on French Canadian families.
Not surprisingly, the Grande Bibliothèque holds the largest collection of French and English books in Quebec, plus more than 4,000 titles in other languages. In the book collection, Jacques recently researched the Huguenots in New France, Acadia, other parts of Canada, the US, France, and the British Isles.
Another friend uses the library’s collection of community histories, city directories, history books published outside Canada, and the newspaper archives on microfilm. Recent newspapers, from 2000 to today, are not available on microfilm, but can be ordered from an off-site location.
In 2004, a year before the library opened in its new facilities, the Quebec government announced the merger of the library and the Quebec Archives — the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ).
Fact du jour
The Journal de Montréal newspaper reported that if you could unroll all of the microfilms at BAnQ and place them end to end, they would extend from Montreal to Perth, Australia.
