The French National Library’s massive programme to digitise billions of books and documents should widen their availability without violating copyright rules, the head of the library said Tuesday.

In the last decade, the library, known as the BNF, has collected 10 billion documents online, and is currently scanning the pages of 300,000 books into digital format as part of a plan to set up a European virtual library.

Library head Bruno Racine said the BNF and the French Publishers’ Association were drawing up economic and legal guidelines enabling the release of online editions to the public.