Find a person in the Bibliothèque nationale de France authority file by name, and get the identifier the other tools take. This matches the name the BnF records, so it takes a surname, a full name or both names in either order. It does not read biographies, so it cannot find a person from what they wrote or what they did. It reads the person records and nothing else: an organisation, a conference or a place is outside it, and an answer holding no row says nothing about those. The match is letter for letter, so a name written with other accents or under another transliteration is a different search: try the spellings a library would use before concluding the BnF holds nobody of that name. Several rows can carry one name: the BnF keeps more than one authority record for some people, and many people share a name. Read 'birth_year', 'death_year' and 'role' to tell them apart, and show the caller the choice rather than picking one. Rows come back ordered by the address of the record, which is not an order of relevance. That order is the one the pages are cut along, so paging through a search reaches every match once. One search reads a fixed window of the index. 'index_window_full' says whether that window came back full: when it did, names sit past what was read, 'has_more' being false says where the reading stopped, and another reading of the same search can bring back other rows. Narrow the name to reach further.

Read one person's record in the Bibliothèque nationale de France authority file, by the identifier search_authors returns. It carries the dates and places of birth and death, the occupation the record names, the language and country it associates with the person, the field of activity with its Dewey class, and the addresses for the same person in VIAF, IdRef, DBpedia, Wikidata and ISNI. It carries no biography. The field the BnF calls biographical information is a job title on most records and a single word on many, so quote it as what the catalogue states and do not build a life story out of it. It lists no work. list_works walks from this record to the works the catalogue names the person the creator of, and states what that link does and does not reach. 'depictions' are images data.bnf.fr attaches to the person. They are links for a person to open; this server does not read them, and an image can be a page that mentions the person rather than a portrait of them.

Find a work in the Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogue by words in its title, and get the identifier get_work and list_editions take. A row matches when its title carries every word given. The index returns no measure of how well a row matches, so the rows are ordered by the address of the record and the work a person would call the obvious answer can sit anywhere in the list or on a later page. A study of a book carries the book's title, so a search for a famous title returns the criticism alongside the work. Read 'creators' to tell them apart. This reads titles and nothing else. Searching a person's name returns the works written about them, whose creators are their critics; list_works is what walks from a person to the works the catalogue names them the creator of. 'status' says whether the BnF has established the work as a record of its own or holds it provisionally under a title it has catalogued. One search reads a fixed window of the index, and that window is read before the works are told apart from everything else the index holds, so even a short list can rest on a full one. 'index_window_full' says which: when it is true, titles sit past what was read, 'has_more' being false says where the reading stopped, and another reading of the same search can bring back other rows. Add a word to the title to reach further.

Read one work's record in the Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogue, by the identifier search_works returns. It carries the title, everyone the record credits, the date the BnF gives the work, its language, its form and its subject with the Dewey class. 'forms' holds the work-form vocabulary's own terms, which carry no label in this dataset, so some read as words and some do not. A record stating none has a form the catalogue does not state. 'status' says whether the record is established or provisional, and 'status_statement' repeats what the catalogue itself states. A provisional identifier can change, so cite an established one where there is a choice. 'expression_count' counts the expressions the record links, which is not a count of published editions: use list_editions for those.

List the published editions of one work in the Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogue, by the identifier search_works or get_work returns. Each row carries the publisher, the place, the year, the edition statement, the extent in the words of the record, the ISBN when there is one, and the record in the BnF general catalogue. An edition that has been digitised carries a link under 'digitised'. That link says a copy exists at that address; this server never opens it, so it cannot say whether the document is readable, complete, or free to reuse. Rows are ordered by the address the catalogue gives each edition, which is neither by date nor by importance.

List the works the Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogue names one person the creator of, by the identifier search_authors returns. This is the tool for 'what did this person write'. Each row carries the title, the date the record gives the work, the form codes the catalogue points at, whether the record is established or provisional, and the identifier get_work, list_editions and find_digitised take. It is not a bibliography. It reports one link the catalogue holds, and the catalogue credits a person on a record in other ways and holds editions whose work it has never established, so a work missing here is not a work the person did not write. The form codes are the work-form vocabulary's own terms and carry no label in this dataset, so some read as words and some do not. A work stating no code has a form the catalogue does not state, so keeping the rows carrying one code finds the works that declare it and never all the works of that form. Rows are ordered by the address the catalogue gives each work, which is neither chronological nor an order of importance. No total is reported, because the catalogue counts nothing here and a count would read as a measure of what the person wrote.

Gather the digitised documents the Bibliothèque nationale de France catalogue attaches to one person or one work, and return them as links. Give the identifier of either; the tool asks the catalogue what kind of record it is and follows the right path. For a work it walks the editions; for a person it takes the images on the record and the digitised editions of the works they are credited with. The 'kind' returned is what the catalogue types the record as. Every result is a link for someone to open. This server reads the BnF catalogue and never requests gallica.bnf.fr, so it reports nothing about what is at the other end: not whether the document opens, not what it contains, not on what terms it may be reused. It returns links and nothing else: no publisher, no date, no ISBN. Use list_editions when which edition a copy belongs to matters. A 'depiction' illustrates a record and can be a page that merely mentions the subject. A 'reproduction' is an edition digitised. An 'ocr' link names a machine-read text of a document, which this server does not fetch.