Biblioteque nationale de France

Having been a French minor in undergrad, I chose to examine the National Library of France. The homepage is well organized, with lots of pictures and neat graphics and has many different languages available to its patrons. In English, the page is not as flashy or aesthetically pleasing but gives good information nonetheless. However, I wanted to examine the main OPAC of the system, which is only available in French. It was a good exercise for me; with my basic (and becoming increasingly more basic as time passes by) French I was somewhat able to simulate the experience of a new library user. The words chosen in French were sometimes different than I expected them to be (which often happens with library users) and I had to think sometimes about the meaning of a word in this new context. That handicap taken into account, I had surprisingly little difficulty searching for various books, both French and American, novels and non-fiction. Overall, the layout of the catalog is logical and provides features that improve the searching immensely.
The OPAC has a list of personal features for registered users. There is a personal profile where you can view your previous searches (mes recherches), your preferences or favorites (mes preferences), and reservations or holds on books. They also provide a glossary and a help page (aide) to help you with your navigation of the site and your searches. Between the glossary and a web dictionary to help me when I really got stuck, I was able to perform several searches and evaluate the OPAC accordingly. I did a few known searches for French and American titles (Pere Goriot by Balzac, A Tale of Two Cities by Dickens, and Harry Potter by Rowling). I was able to find results fairly easily and quickly. The results page has filters that you can apply to your results (you can filter by date, language, country, city, format) which is handy if you forgot to limit your search results to books. This way allows you to filter your results and saves time so you don't have to search again or try to find the advanced search. Another feature I enjoyed was the list of links that showed the pathway to your results. For example, if you searched "Harry Potter", then clicked on a result to look at the record, then clicked on the author for more books, a pathway of links would form at the top of the page that allowed you to link back to a previous step without pushing the browser "back" button (which can sometimes throw off a search engine) or having to go through all your other steps. Another good feature is that you can click on the Dewey Decimal number (and it's interesting that they are using the DDC and not the UDC in the first place) and look at all the items that fall under that number. Boolean terms are available on the advanced search page, which is also handy.
There are a few things that bother me about this website. The overall look is clean and modern, but the streamlined nature of the site can lead to some confusion. For example, the button "Valider" (which strictly means "validate" or "enter") does not really look like a clickable button. This especially becomes apparent when applying the filters to a search. When you want to filter your search, you have to pull down a menu and choose what you want to filter (date, country, language, format, etc.). Then a screen appears asking which dates, languages, or formats you want to keep in the results. At the top of the screen, there is a button "Appliquer" which you click to initially apply the filter. However, that will just take you to this second screen. Then you have to go to the bottom right corner and click "Valider" in order to actually apply those filters to the results. Even after writing my notes about this, I still made this mistake several times. The other problem I have is the lack of pictures for the book covers (which is actually not something most OPACs have, but I like it). The results page can be a little confusing as well, trying to figure out what link to click in order to see the actual record or "notice". Sometimes the book title is hyperlinked in the list, but many times, you have to click on the "Voir les notices" link to see the other records that are not hyperlinked.
Overall I had very little trouble with the OPAC of the Biblioteque Nationale de France. Considering that French is not my first or best language, I feel that the trouble I experienced with it was minor and trivial. In the end, I was able to find all the books that I wanted in the different forms that I looked for. Vive la France! :)