Bibliographical notices of the Heritage Base

### Description of the Heritage Base The Heritage Base is one of the most important French bibliographic databases. It is intended to draw attention to documents kept in: - old funds, - local or specialized funds selected for their richness, originality. These can be kept in territorial libraries, museums, archives, ministries (excluding institutions under the Ministry of Higher Education). Books represent most of the documents described (more than 90% of the records) but there are also still images, periodicals, manuscripts, maps, sound documents and other types of media. A third of the books described date from before 1811, another third having been published between 1811 and 1914, the rest having been published after 1914. French represents 3/4 of the books, but many languages are also present: Latin, Angese, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Basque, Occitan, etc. The Heritage Base is hosted by the Collective Catalogue of France and fed by the partner libraries of the BnF, via loading of notices. These loads are done two to three times a year, for one or more libraries each time. The records are loaded by library and documentary holdings. There is no duplication of records between the different loads, to respect the particularities of each copy (membership of a fonds, binding, provenance, handwritten notes, gaps). Data is updated by deleting existing data and loading existing data, which involves modifying the existing ark link. ### Dataset Recovery (from 1 June 2021) As of May 2021, the Heritage Base represents more than 8.7 million records from more than 1,200 heritage holdings in 255 libraries across France. The corresponding dataset represents more than 1000 files in UNIMARC format, with a weight exceeding 6 GB. And, throughout the year, hundreds of thousands of records are added or updated, in dozens of funds. Under these conditions, updating the dataset is a very cumbersome task without the result really matching the needs of potential users. What interest, in fact, for someone who would like to work only on a specific fund to be forced to download the entire dataset and then extract a single file? Or for someone who would only look for documents published over a period or published in a language, obliged to sort through all the notices? The Collective Catalogue of France has therefore decided to suspend the update of the Base patrimoine dataset. Instead, we propose to study with you the extraction of records on request, according to precise criteria, and subject to the technical possibilities of the export tool. We hope that this new service will better meet your expectations and that it will allow you to make the most of this very rich pool of data. The Heritage Base also remains under Open License and its data are therefore always freely usable, subject to mentioning the source. It is also possible to extract records directly from the CCFr, using the "Export" feature accessible from the results list or from the records. ### Find out more - on the Heritage Base: [https://www.bnf.fr/en/la-base-patrimoine](https://www.bnf.fr/en/la-base-patrimoine) - on the UNIMARC format: [https://www.transition-bibliographique.fr/systems-et-donnees/manuel-unimarc-format-bibliographique/](https://www.transition-bibliographique.fr/systems-et-donnees/manuel-unimarc-format-bibliographique/) - on MarcEdit: [https://marcedit.reeset.net/](https://marcedit.reeset.net/)