About Agate

INRAE is the french research institute for agriculture, food and environment.  Both research institutes, Inra and Irstea merged in INRAE in 2020. Each one has initiated and piloted digitisation campaigns for their collections and Agate is the opportunity to join them  in one digital library.

Agate was born out of a partnership with the Bibliothèque nationale de FranceI (BNF), allowing the use of the Gallica digital library’s features, and a partnership with the Archives Nationales to gather and give greater visibility to an old, dispersed and very rich collection of images from the restoration of mountain land (more than 11,000 images).

Agate provides access to books, journals and photographs of historical, scientific and geographical interest. These documents, which often come from the former libraries of the agronomic stations under the Ministry of Agriculture (19th and early 20th centuries), illustrate the state of agronomic science at the turn of the 20th century.

The documents, organised by theme, are accompanied by spotlight (articles - features) aimed at the general public in order to facilitate their understanding and appropriation for various purposes.
The collections of printed matter and journals were brought to our institute by various documentation centres. They have been progressively digitised over the last ten years by external service providers and added to the Gallica digital library.

Theresults of the digitisation are in the vast majority of cases  photographicimages (1page = 1 view), obtaining thus very high quality  images withoutcompromising the physical integrity of the documents. No retouching is done so that the digital version reproduces the original document as accurately as possible.

Some of the documents provided by Agate come from other digital libraries, partners of the BNF.

In 2021, our library and documentation centre collections received the CollEx-Persée label for the richness of their holdings, awarded by the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.

We intend to progressively enrich Agate on past and present INRAE research themes in conjunction with the institute's history committee, by showcasing collections of images, drawings, prints or manuscripts