Discover the BnF's web archive collections

​Blogs by amateur writers or historians, social media of election candidates, research laboratory sites, press and news sites, etc.: In the “Archives de l’internet” application you will find sites selected by the BnF’s departments as an extension of their printed collections.

 

Guided tours in the web archives

collections

All the collections are available in the same “Archives de l’internet” application. They cover all the subject areas represented at the BnF, with a focus on specific topics, recurring events and particular technical items. Since 2011, these crawls have been carried out at varying frequencies for the different sites, according to departmental requests (from “several times a day” to “once a year”).

Themed collections 

  • Performing arts 
  • Maps & plans 
  • Discovering the collections and research support
  • Law, economics, politics 
  • Official publications 
  • Prints & photography
  • Literature and art 
  • Personal diaries
  • Auction houses (since 2013):
  • LIFRANUM (2022) 
  • Music 
  • Philosophy, history, human sciences
  • The First World War on the Web (2013-2019) 
  • Social movements (since 2012)
  • Solidarity
  • Science and technology 
  • Bodycapital (2021) 
  • Artificial intelligence (since 2020)
  • Environmental issues (since 2020)
  • Sound, video, multimedia

The regional collections

In partnership with the BnF, five libraries in the French regions (Bibliothèque nationale universitaire de Strasbourg, Bibliothèque municipale de Nancy, Médiathèques Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, Bibliothèque de l’Alcazar de Marseille and Bibliothèque départementale de la Réunion) also select sites on:
  • Alsace (since 2013)
  • Lorraine (since 2016)
  • Montpellier (since 2015)
  • Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (since 2022)
  • Réunion (since 2022)

Event collections 

  • Elections: Since 2002, the BnF has been crawling the electoral web at each election to document French political life.
  • Olympic Games: This collection includes sites linked to the Summer and Winter Olympic Games since 2012.
  • The COVID-19 collection: A crawl was carried out from February to July 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown.

For more information on the covid-19 collection

consult the list of urls selected for the covid-19 collection

The website www.cafe-sciences.org selected by the Science and Techniques Department and archived on 8 April 2014

The press and news collections 

  • Ephemeral news (since 2018): This collection concerns phenomena that are relayed via social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.), blogs and sites that are likely to have a limited lifespan.
  • News: This collection consists of around 90 press titles and other sites dedicated to news, collected daily by the BnF since December 2010. The archived sites fall into four categories: national press, regional press, specialist press and news portals. This collection is subject to full-text indexing.
  • Paid press (since 2012): This collection includes local editions of the regional daily press in PDF format, as well as parts of sites reserved for subscribers to certain online newspapers and news pure-players.

See the list of press titles and news websites collected by the Bnf

audiovisual

  • Podcasts (2023-)
  • Videos: Collection of Dailymotion channels from 2007 to 2013 and YouTube channels from 2017 onwards.

Discover the list of video channels collected by the BnF

Social media

  • Facebook (from 2007 to 2020) and Twitter (from 2017 to 2023) were crawled on a daily basis. However, due to technical problems, it has not been possible to collect Facebook content since the end of 2020 and Twitter since July 2023.

  • Instagram (since 2020): A few hundred Instagram accounts and tags have been crawled two or three times a year since 2020.

  • TikTok (since 2022): Around a hundred TikTok accounts and tags have been crawled every year since 2022.

On-demand crawls

Lastly, the BnF has an “urgent collection” procedure that enables it to quickly capture sites that need to be collected by a specific date (for trade fair or festival sites, for example) or that are likely to disappear (blogs from Le Monde.fr or Libération.fr, Flash sites, Skyblogs and Orange personal pages). 
It is also possible to suggest sites for collection either by contacting the Digital Legal Deposit Service directly or during calls for public contributions organised on an ad hoc basis for certain collections (artificial intelligence or electoral collections, for example).
Suggest a website

The guided tours

To promote these collections to the general public and researchers alike, librarians and researchers produce themed, editorial selections. These tours can only be accessed via the “Archives de l’internet” application at the BnF and its partner libraries in the French regions.
Text versions of these tours without the images or the ability to navigate the sites are available in PDF format. Since 2021 and the guided tour devoted to the first lockdown and the COVID-19 pandemic, the tours have been accompanied by slideshows of captures for which authorisation has been obtained from site producers, in order to illustrate them.
Discover the guided tours

Contact