A Museum librarian recently drew my attention to the following useful
online portals for Polish and French information.

1. Polona.pl http://www.polona.pl/

250,000+ items >from the National Library in Warsaw.
Very "librarian" with tons of search options and tons of metadata
Diacritics-sensitive!

Requires a free login to download as PDF
Allows item level deep linking
Integrated for sharing materials on social media and email.

Check out this Haszomer Hadati item >from Krakow

2. State Archives of Poland Online http://www.szukajwarchiwach.pl/
combines several existing catalogs, databases and guides

includes 10 million pages of scanned documents
diacritics sensitive
has easy post-search filters to limit results

clunky to browse between pages
includes their logo as a watermark behind every image downloaded
(kinda neat!)

Allows you to deeplink to a single scan (frame of microfilm or page of
book)--see my great-grandparents' 1896 wedding register

3. Archives National du Department de Loire
http://www.archivesdepartementales.lenord.fr/?id=etat_civil

Their "search" is only a browse with some clunky limits (boo!)
Even the same browse gets different results each time (bad metadata?)

allows printing but not downloading
very fast and easy to navigate between pages of the film (arrow keys are an
option!)
great zoom and click-and-drag features
requires users to "agree" to terms in order to proceed

linking goes to start of item, not the page
scanning quality is super clear, look at Abancourt 1838

Peter Lande
Washington, D.C.