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. 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 in the order the index returned them, which is not an order of relevance.

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 does not list the person's works. The catalogue links them, and no tool here walks that link: search_works reads titles, so a work is found by its title rather than by its author. '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 in index order 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. It cannot find the works of a named person: searching a person's name returns works written about them, whose creators are their critics. '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.

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. '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 in the order the catalogue holds them, which is neither by date nor by importance.

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 reads 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. 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.