At the National Library of France, in addition to archiving the material memory of French heritage, the French Web has been archived for twenty years.
Millions of sites are archived each year to preserve individual and collective memory.
In the basement of the BnF, hundreds of servers are carefully guarded by a meticulous team.
It's an October morning like any other at the National Library of France, in the 6th arrondissement.
Students and doctoral students throng to the porticoes, their eyes still half-closed from the morning awakening.
Here, silence is golden.
To access the collection and storage equipment room, we take the stairs, elevators and long corridors accompanied by Adoté Chilloh, head of information systems security at the National Library of France.
A maze accessible to only a few initiates, badges in hand.
In the basement of the library with huge towers overlooking the Seine, the engine room, where computer servers and storage infrastructure house decades of history.
Because in the same way as old documents are kept by the National Library of France, our contemporary era is inseparable from our online activity.
And at the end of 2022, we celebrate the anniversary of twenty years of archiving the French Web.
Keep longer and further than yourself
Since 2002, the date of the first collection of the Web on the occasion of the presidential elections, a team from the National Library of France has been responsible for digital legal deposit: namely, archiving the French Web, in the same way that the BnF has for mission the legal deposit of physical works (books, periodicals, audiovisual documents, maps and plans).
Archive, preserve, preserve: millions of Internet pages, press articles, Skyblogs and Instagram posts are stored in huge servers.
By archiving the Web of the past, the BnF archives with it a piece of our history and collective memory… Which will perhaps be the subject of research by the historians of tomorrow.
“The first collection machines set up by the BnF date from 2002,” says Adoté Chilloh, who saw the birth of the digital legal deposit service.
From the "Petaboxes", the first server racks (in the shape of huge red "pizza boxes"), incorporating storage and interconnected, used until the beginning of the 2010s, servers have evolved: they are now virtualized, with shared storage spaces and stored in Cold Corridors, these huge fridges filled with computer equipment, which participate in the energy saving policy.
Heritrix, sensor of our online memory
To keep pace with online content that increasingly includes more images and videos, heavier information to store, approximately 150 terabytes are added each year to store new data.
“The BnF's mission is to preserve the heritage collected over the long term,” adds the head of information systems security.
The BnF's IT departments then have the role of ensuring the preservation of data with the necessary security, from servers to storage devices and including magnetic tapes.
Every year, a small robot called Heritrix captures and collects data from millions of websites.
In addition to a general annual collection, the digital legal deposit of the BnF collects from several times a day to several times a year certain content by theme, from news sites to environmental issues, from the Olympic Games to the Covid epidemic -19 through the elections in France.
Because often, online, websites evolve, transform, disappear according to fashions and years.
Do you remember, did you leave somewhere an old blog, a forum, a Skyblog about your passion for Tokio Hotel?
It may be kept at the BnF, with a view to being studied by historians or sociologists in the coming decades.
The collections carried out in 2021, for example, covered nearly 5.6 million sites:
Culture
Literature: Pierre Michon winner of the BnF prize
By the Web
Coronavirus: From #OnOublieraPas to #OuSontlesMasques, the epidemic seen from the Internet archived by the BnF
By the Web
bnf
instagram
French
Olympic Games
Elections
Archives
Memory