Internet archives

The Internet archives built up by BnF can be consulted in the Research library at the François Mitterrand Library (Site François-Mitterrand) and the Richelieu Library (Site Richelieu).

Since 1 August 2006, the Library has been charged with collecting, preserving, and providing access to “French domain” Internet sites under the legal deposit scheme (Act 2006-961).
As such, BnF’s priority is to collect the following sites:

• those ending in .fr
• those not ending in .fr (.com, .org, etc.) but whose authors are resident in France or whose content is produced in France
  

Sites are collected using harvester robots that copy pages, images, animations, and audio and video files. Sites are then dated and indexed before being reconstituted in their original published context. This means that the archives can be browsed just like the Internet, by clicking from link to link.

It is not possible to archive every site and every page within a site. BnF uses a combination of two archiving methods to build up representative samples of the French Internet:

• Broad-scope data gathering is used to build up samples of several hundred thousand sites. Over the period from 2004 to 2008, these data gathering exercises were carried out once a year in partnership with the American Internet Archive foundation. BnF brought this data gathering activity in-house in 2010.
• Targeted data gathering is used to build up more complete and more frequent archives of a limited number of sites identified by librarians working either within a discipline (e.g. literature) or on a topic (e.g. the 2007 elections or sustainable development).

In 2010, BnF’s Internet archives contained approximately 13.6 billion files, some of which date back as far as 1996.

Various “guided tours” of the Internet archives present a selection of sites based around a given theme.