Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Abstract

Since its birth in the early seventeenth century, the press has played a prominent role in the political and social life of France.Over the two last decades, the economic and even cultural pillars on which the press ecosystem is built has been challenged by the growing use of digital technologies, and by the increasing role of the Internet as a way to distribute and access information.Heritage libraries are affected by these major changes.They need to address the accelerating shift from analogue to digital in order to maintain the continuity of their objectives and of their missions: being able to collect and preserve cultural items, and being able to document the way these items were produced, distributed and used.Many aspects need to be taken into account: legal, scientific, technical, economic and organizational issues have to be identified and addressed.This paper looks at the example of the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France or BnF), and at the way it has dealt with collecting newspapers in digital form. During the ten last years, the BnF has launched several experiments, testing different approaches, with varying degrees of success:-Direct deposit of electronic publications on physical media (CDs and DVDs) or through FTP.This way of collecting has been experimented with by BnF for some regional newspapers whose local versions were not kept in their paper form; and for which a digital substitute was searched out.This paper explains why the experiments were not conclusive.-Fully automated web harvesting.Since December 2010, almost 100 news websites (national and daily newspapers, pure players, news portals…) are collected on a daily basis.This harvest gives a very good overview of the kind of information available to French Internet users, but does not allow the collection of publications for which payment is required.

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