It was launched in October 2015, following the previous digitization initiatives of BAnQ with additional funding from the Quebec Ministry of Culture.

[2] Following the adoption of the Plan culturel numérique du Québec in September 2014, BAnQ increased its efforts to offer its services online with a 5.25 million grant from the Quebec Ministry of Culture.

The BAnQ numérique portal was created to assist in ease of access to its collection, aimed to be more user friendly than previous offerings.

[5] It was proposed that the public be allowed to edit the optical character recognition data, to correct errors that come from the automatic process.

[2] In spring 2019, it began to utilize Creative Commons licenses and other to inform its users of the licensing requirements on works, following the identification of many puiblic domain works in its collection; this followed the release of 100,000 of its digitized documents into the public domain.