Abstract
The collections held by the National Library of France (BnF) are part of the national heritage and include nearly 31 million documents of all types (books, journals, manuscripts, photographs, maps, etc.). New collection challenges have been posed by the emergence of the Internet. Within an international framework, the BnF is developing policy guidelines, workflows and tools to harvest relevant and representative segments of the French part of the Internet and organise their preservation and access. The Web archives of the French national domain were developed as a new service, released as a new application and made available to the public in April 2008. Since then, strategies have been and continue to be developed to involve librarians and reach out end users. This article will discuss the BnF experiment and will focus specifically on four issues: * collection building: Web archives as a new and challenging collection, * resource discovery: access services and tools for end users, * usage: facts and figures, * involvement: strategies to build a librarian community and reach out end users.
Highlights
The Web archives of the French national domain were developed as a new service, released as a new application and made available to the public in April 2008
With a constantly growing number of Internet users and an increasing number of French websites (1.7 million domains are registered under the .fr extension alone, called Top Level Domain or TLD),1 it became crucial to look into this type of publication and communication medium, which is still quite new to a national library
A website is not a single PDF file, it is not a single JPEG or a TIFF image, but it is multifaceted: a web page is a compilation of many elements that may come from many places and which are assembled together as each web user views the site with a browser
Summary
The Internet has taken on an important role to play in our daily lives: e-administration, e-learning, e-business, online publications, digital arts, blogs and new public spaces dedicated to discussion and chat, to name only a few. An analysis of the harvest of a sample of 2.9 million French websites in 2007 showed that there were about 1,600 different Internet media types.. A website does not have a beginning and it cannot be read to the end It is an intellectual entity which can be seen differently from one user to the other. It exists in relation with a network of other websites linked together by hyperlinks, a network of links which is even stronger than that of a scientific publication based on citations and bibliographic information. Websites and web content are ephemeral: a web page may disappear at any time and for many reasons: voluntary or involuntary withdrawal by the webmaster, non renewal of the domain name, disk crash or network access problems with the host server, etc. On the occasion of a cooperative selection and harvest project of political websites during the 2007 French Presidential elections, the Library of Lyon found that 52% of 421 websites they selected were either totally or almost closed five months after the poll.
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