Le Depot Legal de la Toile

The Bibliothèque nationale de France has been involved in experimenting all the different potential acquisition procedures that allows the extension of its historical Legal deposit mission to the Internet and particularly today the Web, which is the newest public contents dissemination carrier. Since 2004 BnF has been involved in a demonstration pilot phase for collecting, storing and providing access to the researchers. BnF is working at the real web scale and is building on a technical system that integrates the preservation and access rights management constraints of the classical legal deposit. The work done so far includes fundamental thoughts on the essence of the legal deposit and on description processes of Internet contents. BnF is currently working in collaboration with other French institutions in charge by law of the legal deposit or responsible for the administrative and legal archiving. An intensive international standardisation effort along with tool development is carried out within the International Internet Preservation Consortium initiated and leaded by BnF. The very large collections already gathered will the basis for usage studies and for the improvement of indexing and navigating tools. They are stored in the BnF’s digital repository, aside with the electronic administrative records, the born-digital collections purchased and the digitised documents. The collections will make possible a valuable work on digital long-term preservation at real scale.