Clément Oury
email: clement.oury@bnf.fr

All we need is news preservation: harvesting digital newspapers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Keywords:

Acquiring, promoting and giving access to press collections is a major objective for heritage institutions, which need to address the accelerating shift from analogue to digital documentation in order to maintain the continuity of their missions. At the National library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France or BnF), this mission has mainly been performed in the framework of legal deposit. In 2006, a new law on copyright extended this legal deposit to the internet: its scope covers all kinds of news websites, from digital equivalents of printed newspapers to journalists' blogs and news aggregation portals. During the last ten years, the BnF has experimented two different approaches to ensure the preservation of online news: direct deposit of electronic publications and web harvesting of freely accessible new websites; the latter has been more successful than the former. In order to cover subscription based content, the BnF is experimenting currently a third solution, as a mix of what worked in the two first approaches: web harvesting through agreements with producers. This paper intends to present this third approach, and to explain how the BnF tried to implement it through a dedicated project, the "subscription-based press project". This project launched in late 2012 relies on the possibility of giving the robot a login and a password, in order to let it identify itself as a subscriber. Then, the robot is able to access and copy the protected content. Even though the crawling part was technically the most critical one, this project covered all parts of the documentary lifecycle: from selection to long term preservation, including quality control, cataloguing and access in reading rooms. The paper presents the different steps of the project, its successes and achievements (in terms of collection, technical innovation and human resources), its limits, and considers its future evolutions.

The origins of the "subscription-based press project"

Since its birth in the early seventeenth century, the press has played a prominent role in the political and social life of France, and it is currently one of the most useful sources for historians and social scientists. Therefore, acquiring, promoting and giving access to press collections is a major objective for heritage institutions. However, over the last two decades, the economic and even the cultural pillars on which the press ecosystem was built have been challenged by the use of digital technologies, and by the increasing role of the Internet as a way to distribute and access information. A growing number of news titles are now "bimedia", i.e. they are published on paper and on the web. Due to financial difficulties, some others are now only published online; whereas some titles have been created directly on the internet.

Heritage libraries are obviously affected by these major changes. Their mission remains the same: to be able to gather and preserve all cultural items, and to be able to document the way these items are produced, distributed and used. These institutions need to address the accelerating shift from analogue to digital documentation in order to maintain the continuity of their objectives and missions. However, they are faced in this regard with two apparently contradictory problems: on one hand, radically new kinds of documents are appearing, that need to be gathered and preserved. The web allows a far larger number of people to publish news online, hence multiplying the number of titles whose memory should be kept. on the other hand, digital technologies also simplify the way people produce printed documents. The number of printed titles is therefore growing (even though at a slower pace than their online equivalents), challenging the libraries' ability to acquire, index and store them. For example, 40,000 different titles are currently received by the periodicals legal deposit service at BnF, representing a total number of 330,000 issues each year. In short, the dramatic increase in news websites does not necessarily lead to a decrease in what is available on paper. But both kinds of media are part of national cultural heritage and should be preserved for future generations.

At the Bibliothèque nationale de France, this mission is mainly performed in the framework of legal deposit. Legal deposit is the obligation for every producer of cultural content to send copies of its works to the national library. It was introduced by King François I, at a time where the invention of the printing press radically enhanced the possibility of producing and distributing books. It has then been progressively extended to all kinds of cultural items, from engravings to radio, television and software. In 2006, a new law on copyright created a legal deposit of the internet, which covers all kinds of news websites, from digital equivalents of printed newspapers to journalists' blogs and news aggregation portals.

Before and after the publication of this law (now part of the Heritage Code), the BnF has launched several experiments and tested different approaches to ensure the preservation of online news: direct deposit of electronic publications on physical media (CDs and DVDs) or through FTP. This way of collecting has been experimented with by the BnF for some regional newspapers whose local versions were not kept in their paper form; and for which a digital substitute was sought; fully automated web harvesting; web harvesting through agreements with producers. These approaches reached varying degrees of success. The experiments towards the first solution (direct deposit) were not conclusive at the time they were conducted. The second approach, harvesting, was more successful, but it didn't manage to cover the whole scope of online news. The third solution is in a sense a mix of what worked in the two first solutions. This paper intends to present this third approach, and to explain how the BnF tried to implement it through a dedicated project, the "subscription-based press project". This contribution is a continuation of a previous paper which was given during the IFLA satellite session of the newspapers section in Mikkeli (Finland), in August 2012 and which presented the outcomes of the two first solutions1 [START_REF] Oury | When press is not printed: the challenge of collecting digital newspapers at the Bibliothèque nationale de France[END_REF].

Harvesting news websites with robots

The use of harvesting technologies at the BnF To ensure its mandate of preserving online heritage, especially for the field of press and newspapers, the BnF decided to rely on web harvesting technologies. In this system, the BnF uses crawling software, also called robots. They act as automated web user: starting from a list of URLs given by the human administrator, the robots follow hyperlinks and copy all pages, files, PDFs, videos, etc. that they may discover. However, the robots also obey strict rules that allow them, or not, to collect certain contents; it is thus possible to restrict the crawl to a specific domain name or set of domain names (e.g. to crawl only files hosted on the bnf.fr domain name), or to a specific Top Level Domain (e.g. to crawl only files hosted on the .fr TLD). These rules are the robots "parameters". An important parameter is the frequency of the crawl: it is possible to assign different harvesting frequencies according to the rate of modification of the targeted websites. After experiments between 2000 and 2005, the BnF installed its first permanent crawling infrastructure in 2006, and continuously developed it. In December 2010, the BnF was able to collect on a daily basis around 80 news websites (national and daily newspapers, pure players, news portals…); 100 websites are currently crawled every day. This harvest (called the "news" collection) covers, for each website, the main page and web pages directly accessible from the home page. It 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. It was therefore necessary to find a way to access and crawl this protected content.

Objectives and scope of the subscription-based press project

The subscription-based press project was launched in late 2012, in order to tackle this issue. This project relies on the possibility of giving the robot a login and a password, in order to let it identify itself as a subscriber. Then, the robot is able to access and copy the protected content. Even though the crawling part was technically the most critical one, this project covered all parts of the documentary lifecycle: identification and selection of the news websites to be harvested as a priority; contacts with the website publishers in order to get ID and password; tests and actual crawls of the protected parts of the websites; quality control; access and promotion;

long term preservation. Very quickly, it appeared that the project should focus on the regional daily press, and target more specifically the PDF equivalent of the printed versions (when applicable). This decision has been taken to ensure the continuity of BnF press collections. In fact, the regional daily titles generally propose many local versions according to the district where they are distributed. Only a few pages vary between the different local versions. For example, the largest regional title, Ouest France, has currently more than 50 local editions. For storage reasons, it is not possible to collect the paper version of these local editions. In order to respect the principles of legal deposit, the BnF is microfilming some of thembut it is a costly activity, and probably not a long-term one as there is a threat to the maintenance of microfilm companies and microfilm reading devices. So, harvesting the digital online equivalents of these local editions (as PDF files) appeared as a reasonable replacement solutionand hence a priority for BnF robots.

The project associates all entities that deal with press titles oin printed or digital form: the Law, Economics and Politics Department (Press service), the Legal deposit department (Service of management of periodicals and digital legal deposit service), and the IT department (development service to perform the technical studies and enhance the tools, and production service to run the robots and the machines). At an operational level, it was led by the digital legal deposit service. Representatives of all entities participated in each step of the project.

The different steps

Identification and selection of the titles were of course the first part of the process. A strong focus was given to the regional daily press. Priority criteria of were: titles whose microfilming was about to cease; titles which have a large number of local editions, titles with which the BnF had existing relationships. Ensuring a regional diversity was also considered important. On the other hand, national press titles and titles existing only online were not excluded: some of them were selected according to their audience and their importance in the publishing field. Editorial and technical diversity was also sought.

Contact with publishers.

To obtain IDs and passwords for their robots, BnF teams needed to identify and contact a representative of the title. Depending on the cases, this might be the director of the title, the person responsible for subscriptions, the head of digital services… In several cases, identifying and contacting the right representative has been a long process but all of them understood the legitimacy and the usefulness of digital legal deposit and agreed to give us technical information.

Collection of the content. The first attempts to collect each website met with varying degrees of success. Many tests were sometimes necessary in order to successfully gather the content. In fact, three types of outcomes were seen: successful crawl of the content (easily or after different technical attempts); unsuccessful crawl after the first tests; further developments were still required but were not carried out; crawl of a dedicated space, put online by the publishers for the BnF, containing the targeted content (i.e. PDF equivalents of local editions). An unsuccessful crawl does not necessarily mean that the website was absolutely impossible to crawl; it only means that it has been decided not to use too many resources on a specific website and to turn to other important websites.

Quality control. Two kinds of quality control are performed for the web archiving workflow:

statistical quality control: the reports and metrics of each crawl are analyzed in order to identify if something went wrong: e.g. if too few or too many URLs have been collected for a website; visual quality control: the archived website is visually checked; against its online equivalent when possible. As web archiving processes retrieve millions of websites per year, an individual quality control for each website is not feasible; large-scale statistics are preferred and individual quality assurance procedures are only performed on a representative sample of the collection. However, online press collections differ from other web archives as they correspond (especially for PDF equivalents of printed files) to resources that were previously gathered in their print form. So, as there is a very strong quality check for printed documents, it was decided to also apply strong quality assurance levels to their online equivalents. Moreover, the publication model of news websites may evolve very quickly, leading to an unsuccessful crawl. For example, if the website owner changes the URL where the PDFs are to be downloaded, the robot cannot retrieve anything. It was thus necessary to perform a daily quality control for all titles. For the titles proposing several local editions, a sampling system has been adopted: a different local edition is tested each day. As this individual quality control procedure is very time consuming, and as it doesn't require very technical knowledge, it has been decided that it should not be the responisbility of the curators that perform statistical quality control, but rather to let other professionals be responsible for it. The library assistants that physically handle periodicals that enter through printed legal deposit are therefore now in charge of managing digital collections, as they are performing this visual quality control.

Long term preservation.

As subscription-based parts of the websites are crawled on the technical channels of the "web legal deposit" track, no further developments have been necessary in order to ingest them in the digital repository of the BnF, SPAR (Scalable Preservation and Archiving Repository) [START_REF] Derrot | Preservation is Knowledge: A community-driven preservation approach[END_REF].

Cataloguing. At the BnF, web archives are not catalogued and therefore not searchable through the General Catalogue. This decision was taken as the scale of web archives makes it hardly possible to record all resources in the catalogue. In addition, the granularity of the description of web archives may be very complex: depending on the case, the level can be a whole collection, a website, a sub-site or even a page. It is hardly compatible with the cataloguing techniques originally designed for books and periodicals. So until recently, there was absolutely no relationship between the general catalogue, where the documents on physical media are described, and the access interface of the web archives. However, the case of press websites is different. First, their number is limited and the question of the granularity is easier to solve: the level of description is that of the press title. Second, and more importantly, it seems critical to help readers understand the fact that different kinds of press resources are available in BnF holdings. As the web archives help the BnF ensure the continuity of their collections, it is important that the General Catalogue explains that some titles are first available on print, then on microfilms, and then as web archives. Third, it was possible to leverage the fact that some news websites were already catalogued.The French ISSN Center was already creating records for online press titles in the BnF catalogue: it is technically necessary to do so in order to give them ISSN numbers. So, in most cases cataloguing records were already available, but they were not visible by nonprofessional users as they did not corrspond to resources actually held by the BnF. It was decided to make these records visible for each title that was archived by the BnF, and to make an automated link between the cataloguing record and the web archives access interface.

One last development was required: it was necessary to establish a system of permalinks for each title. The problem is that websites frequently change their URLs (for example, http://www.metrofrance.com harvested since 2010 became http://www.metronews.fr in May 2013). In order to maintain the continuity of a press title, whatever its URL may be, each title was given an "ark" identifier2 . This identifier refers to all URLs under which a press website has been available over time. As an example: clicking on the catalogue record of Le Midi Libre, a newspaper from southern France, leads to a page in the web archive interface, which refers to the dates where the URL http://journaux.midilibre.fr/journauxjdm2013 was archived, then to the dates when the newer URL of the title, http://profil.midilibre.fr/telechargement/ was archived.

Finally, to describe all kind of news websites archived by the BnF, it was decided to apply this procedure not only for the titles crawled through the subscription-based press project, but also to all news websites harvested on a daily basis.

Promotion with the web archives access interface. Within the web archive interface itself, a specific way of promoting collections is available, called the "Guided tours". These are selections of sites prepared by BnF subject librarians, sometimes with external partners, that are intended to provide a user-friendly way of discovering the collections and also to showcase the work done by selectors. A new "tour", called "News and current events", has been added to the list of seven already existing (Elections 2002 and 2007, Literary and personal blogs, web activism, Sustainable development, Arab spring in Tunisia, Amateur images and videos, Online government services). Whereas previous guided tours presented a representative sample, this last one is currently comprehensive, listing all the 115 press titles (freely available or subscription-based) harvested everyday by the BnF.

Results and lessons learnt from the project

Collections harvested in 2013

Started in late 2012, the subscription-based press project was intended to last for one year in order to identify the feasibility of harvesting password-protected websites by robots; and to test the relevancy and the sustainability of this approach. A summary of the outcomes of the project has been prepared at the end of 2013 in order to decide on the next steps. The figures used in this paper are drawn from this summary. During 2013, the representatives of twelve different titles were contacted. Out of these twelve titles:

seven are currently collected; two are technically impossible to collect, due to the publication technologies (embedding of content in Flash pages or use of DRM); the technical analyses of the last three was not fully performed; the first technical tests

were not conclusive and their harvest was not considered a priority.

The negative outcomes were balanced by some very good news. On one occasion, when BnF teams worked with the technical team of a single title in order to set up a specific space where the robot could crawl the target resources, it proved that the same team was also in charge of the other titles of the same news group. Therefore, they were able to open for the BnF a space where all editions of seven different titles (instead of the one initially targeted) were made available.

At the end of 2013, the subscription-based parts of fifteen titles were currently harvested: thirteen regional daily titles (representing 112 local editions) and two national daily titles. The volume of data archived varies considerably from title to title, depending on the technical architecture of the website and on the number on local editions. It ranges from 4 URLs to 24 000 URLs and from less than 0,1 Mo to 3 Mo.

Main achievements

On the positive side, this project has represented a chance for the web legal deposit team to set up new techniques and processes that will be applied to other type of online publications:

harvesting of password-protect content thanks to crawling robots has proved its efficiency, and may be relevant for any kind of content whose access is restricted. It is for example currently used to collect online music scores. cataloguing of web archives may be applied to any kind of harvested content; it may be especially relevant for blogs whose author is also the author of resources on other media. the system of links between the catalogue and the web archives has been reused: it is now possible to make a relationship between "BnF Archives and Manuscripts", the catalogue for BnF non-published content, and the web archives.

This project had also human resources aspects. In order to perform the visual quality control of the collections, it was necessary to involve professionals that were not used to dealing with digital materialthe library assistants. A team of 3 assistants (out of 21) volunteered to experiment with these new kinds of tasks. After specific training, it appeared that this role was seen as a complement rather than a risk to the "traditional" work on periodicals. The number of agents involved is now due to increase. This experience also helped the legal deposit department to intensify its reflection on how to assist its entire staff to switch from a solely paper-based activity to a digital and paper-based activity. A general training program intended for the ca 140 professionals of the department was launched in the first semester of 2014, which takes into account the lessons learnt from this project.

The dark side of the crawl

As already stated, web archiving does not solve all technical difficulties involved in in letting digital newspapers enter library holdings; some press titles are impossible to harvest with crawling technologies. But this system has other shortcomings. It is highly dependent on the website owner. Each modification of the website architecture, e.g. the use of a different publication technology, may break the entry chain and call for modifications by crawl engineers. In addition, the website owner may forget to renew the free subscription of the library, hence preventing the robot accessing protected content. Finally, "catch-up crawls" are not easy to perform. Content is not generally held on press websites for longer than one week; the web legal deposit team must therefore be highly reactive in order to be sure not to miss any content. Some press websites even propose the daily edition only: every delay in crawling the document means therefore a gap in the collection.

The future of the projectand its alternatives

An assessment of the project was performed after one year of experiment, at the end of 2013. It was first decided to proceed with new titles, still focusing on those which were microfilmed by the BnF. From January to May 2014, seven new titles were added. Twenty-two digital newspapers are thus currently entering the BnF collections every day; of which twenty are regional newspapers, representing 194 local editions.

It was also decided to work on organizational issues. The "press project" was considered a priority for the web legal deposit team in 2013, as it was in its launch phase; but other important matters were arising in 2014. Therefore, fewer resources could be dedicated to the project. The team is now figuring out an organizational scheme that allows reactivity to handle unexpected crawling problems of news websites, while not monopolizing the time of librarians and engineers.

These new collections should also be actively promoted. New indexing and access services have been developed; however BnF readers are not sufficiently aware of them. BnF communication tools (readers' journal, website, blogs) will be used. Communication should also be directed towards the librarians in charge of reference desks, as they will act themselves as mediators and promoters of these collections.

Finally, alternative solutions are being explored. Some newspaper publishers proposed to the library to deposit PDFs on an FTP platform. As already explained, the first attempts to set up an FTP deposit system were unsuccessful. However, this was less due to technical problems than to the lack of maturity of the publishers' printing workflows; this situation has now evolved and better procedures may be put in place. Lessons may be learnt from the current design of the process for legal deposit of ebooks [START_REF] Derrot | Ebooks: rather electronic or book? Extending legal deposit to ebooks at the Bibliothèque nationale de France[END_REF]. For press titles, two stakeholders may be identified as potential partners: either the press publishers themselves (such as for the web harvesting approach) or distributors (who will be the main technical partners of the BnF for the ebooks legal deposit).

As a conclusion, we may state that this project is successful, as it has allowed BnF to quickly harvest some press titles that it was no longer able to gather on paper or on microfilm. It is cost-effective as it provides solutions for access and long-term preservation that are shared with other kind of digital documents. Moreover, robot harvesting techniques are the only practical way to preserve some news websites: those which are only available in HTML form. However, this solution has shortcomings and cannot be considered relevant for all kinds of press titles. Some of them are technically impossible to harvest; some websites have a rate of change so high that it becomes very expensive to adjust the crawling parameters for every modifications. Therefore, new entry trackssuch as FTP depositshould be experimented to complement the robot solution.

We refer to this paper for a detailed explanation of the legal, scientific and organizational framework of the preservation of online news at the BnF, and for a thorough description of the different solutions experimented by the BnF from the beginning of the

st century to 2012.

On the ark identifier and its use at the BnF, see http://www.bnf.fr/en/professionals/issn_isbn_other_identifiers/a.ark_en.html.

Acknowledgments

The author wants to thank Géraldine Camile, responsible for the subscription-based press project, and all the teams working on digital press collections, for their dedication.


Marianne Clatin

Louise Fauduet
email: louise.fauduet@bnf.fr

Clément Oury
email: clement.oury@bnf.fr

Jean-Philippe Tramoni
email: jean-philippe.tramoni@bnf.fr

Digital curators at work: analyzing emerging professional identities at the

Keywords: Digital curation, skills and training, shifting professional identities, human resources, organizations

Digital curation is the global concept that includes all aspects of work on digitized and born digital cultural objects: from document entry to data description or indexing, storage, dissemination, and long-term preservation. It is an expanding activity, whose rules and best practices are not globally defined yet. The BnF has chosen to rely on observations on the ground to understand how its staff, faced with the urgent need to collect and preserve a fast-growing digital heritage, is developing new tasks and skills.

A dedicated group called ORHION, a French acronym for Observatory of Organizations and Human Resources under Digital Influence, has launched a series of studies on professional identities that are particularly affected by the increasing shift to digital activities. It has so far completed its analysis of two subjects: metadata curation and digital entries. In order to assess the BnF's practices, ORHION also relies on other institutions' experiences. It has for instance organized a workshop on web archive curation during this year's general assembly of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, in May 2014.

This paper focuses on the findings of these three use case analyses: the switch from cataloguing to metadata management for description and access; the processes and agents involved in digital entries; and the organization, skills and training of web curating teams. Based on these three experiences, this paper seeks to identify some key trends in digital curation: the notion of digital collection itself is not obvious and needs to be rethought; professional identities are challenged by the apparition of new tasks and the emergence of new actors; stakeholders struggle to understand their own roles and responsibilities in more complex treatment channels. Training staff and sharing the workload between the first pioneers and the rest of the teams are necessary to involve all professionals in digital curation.

The BnF approach and the ORHION observatory

Digital curation is an expanding activity within libraries and other heritage institutions. This concept includes all aspects of work on digitized and born digital objects: from document entry to data description or indexing, storage, dissemination, and long-term preservation. In a sense, it is an adaptation to digital documents of the traditional treatment chain used for analogue media. At the National Library of France, digital curation appeared as soon as the library started managing digital documents: at the end of the 90s, when its digital library, Gallica, was launched. The scope of digital material widened quickly. It widened "horizontally": the library took responsibility over new types of digital objects: web archives, born-digital audiovisual content, ebooks… and "vertically": from creation or reception of digital content to access and long term preservation -BnF's digital repository, SPAR, was launched in 2008 [START_REF] Derrot | Preservation is Knowledge: A community-driven preservation approach[END_REF]. However, the need to consider the impact of these new activities on the library professionals, on the "digital curators", emerged later. When the BnF launched its "mass-digitization" programs, in 2007-2008, hundreds of librarians and other BnF agents were involved in tasks related to the management of digital documents. It became necessary to identify the issues these professionals were facing, the training that was required, and the organizational challenges that were encountered. Throughout 2008 and 2009, the idea of an informal group of librarians interested in sharing their experience of the challenges digital collections posed to their daily activities was put into practice. This group was called ORHION, a French acronym for Observatory of Organizations and Human Resources under Digital Influence; it has progressively developed into something which is officially endorsed for the long term by BnF's top management in 2010 [2 and 3]. The group operates outside existing BnF structures, since its role is to observe and articulate the changes in librarians' practice and skills, not to elaborate the library's strategies. Yet it plays an important role in raising awareness through its four types of action: interviews, working groups, workshops, and information for managers. In its first years, ORHION dealt with issues such as the definition of the digital collection(s), their management in digital repositories, and their promotion towards readers and internet users. In 2013, an emphasis was put on the human side of the question: ORHION launched a series of studies on professional identities that are particularly affected by the increasing shift to digital activities. The BnF management has proposed four areas of investigation for the period 2013-2015: metadata curation, digital entries, interaction between librarians and IT engineers, and new forms of project management. ORHION has so far completed its analysis of the first two subjects. In order to assess the BnF's practices, ORHION also relies on other institutions' experiences. It has for instance organized a workshop on web archive curation during this year's general assembly of the International Internet Preservation Consortium, in May 2014. ORHION observations were not intended to provide a definition of digital curation. However, through these case studies, they carried out a practical analysis of digital curators' activities. This paper will thus focus on the findings of these three recent analyses: the switch from cataloguing to metadata management for description and access; the processes and agents involved in digital entries; and the organization, skills and training of web curating teams.

The switch from cataloguing to metadata management for description and access

Studying metadata management for description meant investigating not only the work of cataloguers, but the different positions and skills that make it possible for a document to be found either in the catalogs or in the digital library, Gallica. An emphasis was put on three specific issues: granularity of description; metadata created outside the library; and the interaction of multiple jobs and skills required for creating the metadata linked to the digitization process.

Granularity issues

Granularity in the catalog has been an issue for some time, particularly regarding serials' description. The digital library is concerned as well, since a large amount of documents available on Gallica are newspapers. Without any tables of content or indexes, highlighting these collections means identifying the different issues of a newspaper. Even though this huge task was never done before in the catalog, the competences required for it already exist in the library: it can indeed be compared to the job done by library assistants when previously preparing the microfilming process. Other types of digitized collections are facing granularity issues, such as pictures by famous photographers, previously collected as slides and now in a digital format. In this case, their description is created by the same cataloguers who already described analogue photographs. While cataloguing a batch of photographs proved to be sufficient in the catalog when a set of 71 slides taken in a theater festival was communicated as a whole to the readers, it is not sufficient in a digital library where the readers expect to find one specific image on a topicpresumably found within different sets of slides. The decision to describe these collections at a picture level meant that the description criteria were now influenced by the access conditions in the digital library, and not only by the catalog. Yet, everyone agreed that the enhancements performed for the digital library should also benefit the original catalog itself, which is still considered the core repository of descriptive metadata on which new services may be built in the future.

Descriptive metadata created outside the library

As a national bibliographic agency, the BnF is responsible for the description of documents within the scope of the national bibliography (produced in France or by French publishers). But what about other kinds of documents? As other libraries derive records from BnF catalogs, the BnF cataloguers derive records of foreign documents from other repositories, such as WorldCat. Time spared thanks to this can be used for other tasks, such as selection for digitization or web legal deposit. However as far as cataloguing itself is concerned, this process also calls into question the identity of cataloguers. Choosing the best record available among the duplicates in WorldCat may be considered less interesting than creating a record from scratch. On the contrary, some cataloguers consider that saving time on description allows them to concentrate on tasks requiring another kind of analysis, such as choosing subject headings, creating links to authorities, or even creating new authority records. The same issue will occur soon when the BnF will be importing publishers' ONIX descriptions of French ebooks received through legal deposit. Another challenge to both skills and organization came from ebooks that were individually purchased. Purchasing here consists of selecting a reference in EBSCO international knowledge base. When the document is not already referenced (which is often the case for non-English written documents), the librarians create the short description themselves, according to the criteria already defined in the EBSCO database. Yet, some consider this description to be insufficient for a library purpose (no subject headings, no link to authority records…). The question then occurs: are cataloguing skills required in such cases? Couldn't the library assistants in charge of regularly checking access to the documents outside the catalog be also responsible for creating the few metadata fields required in these separate tools? And when tens of thousands of ebooks are concerned, shouldn't these professionals be located in the different thematic departments of the library, and not in a single "electronic acquisitions" department?

The interaction of specific skills for description in the digitization process When Gallica started, some considered that description would soon prove useless, since readers would directly access documents without using the catalog. However, a digital library cannot work without a minimum of metadata (descriptive, technical, and even preservation metadata). Digitizing collections is also quite difficult if they are not catalogued at all. A recent case gave the BnF the opportunity to improve its ability to be creative and adapt its processes. When the Medals and Coins department decided to speed up its digitization program of more than a hundred thousand non-catalogued Greek ancient coins, it appeared that creating record after record of full description in the catalog wouldn't be practically feasible. A new metadata workflow was tested for this occasion, that is now considered a model for upcoming similar digitization programs: it consisted in defining a "simple" description model that would not prove sufficient for scholarly research purposes (e.g. without a full iconographic description), but would be sufficient for the purpose of distinguishing documents in the digital library. The cataloguers then described them in a CSV document rather than in the MARC catalog, which was not designed to allow repetition of thousands of identical pieces of information from one record to another. However, using another tool than the catalog meant that a lot of other actors in addition to the cataloguers had to be part of the process in order to have the description finally included in the digital library: curators specialized in a specific type of documents; bibliographical coordinators; IT staff involved in mass data treatment in the catalog; professionals dealing with the photographing process itself; OAI repositories' functional managers; and developers of the digital library. What was pointed out by all these contributors was the importance and professional enrichment of cooperation between different skills and people who did not usually have the opportunity to work together at the library.

The processes and agents involved in digital entries

After metadata specialists, the next individuals considered were professionals dealing with the handling of digital material. A workgroup was convened to define more precisely the domain to be studied. It was decided to conduct this inquiry on five different channels:

the digitization process for various material on physical media; the harvesting of web sites (and especially online press content) in the framework of legal deposit; the legal deposit of digital audiovisual material; the legal deposit of ebooks; subscription to digital periodicals. The channel for the entry of physical objects was kept as a reference for comparison purposes. The investigation had to focus on the processes and agents involved in these five channels, from initial entry to long-term storage, using the same methodology as in previous ORHION studies. Cataloguing and communication were excluded for the scope of this investigation.

Non-linear workflows

The first findings were a confirmation of some basic discrepancies between physical and digital processes. The physical entries channel is characterized by the linearity of the entry process. The tasks are common, so this process is globally similar for all physical media, from books, periodicals or maps to CDs. Within this process, the verification tasks (for instance checking the condition of a physical object) are often implicit. Lastly, the handling of physical objects is a type of task that is assigned to specific actors. On the other hand, the digital entry channels are much less sequential processes. While the quality assurance of material received was implicit in the physical entry channel (when dealing with documents, professionals check if they are damaged or not), it becomes mandatory to make it explicit with digital entries, as the steps are automated. Audit or control tasks show up defects that require rework and therefore create loops in the entry process. In addition, a specific channel is necessary for each type of digital material: no single process model has yet emerged. Finally, this implies different tasks, with different goals, different methods and different actors.

The entry channel for digitized material (in the diagram below) is typical of these observations. There are many checks and verification steps, implying various steps backward and contrasting with the linearity of the physical entry channel. In addition, this channel has to manage two parallel streams. Hence a more explicit management of document flow is required to deal with this complexity.

An evolving distribution of roles and responsibilities

The study showed an evolution in the sharing of roles and responsibilities. Within the physical entry channel, library assistants are the key actors of the processthis is not the case for digital documents. For instance, for the online press entry channel, the responsibilities are distributed between engineers managing the flow of IT operations and librarians working both before and after them in the process, under the supervision of the Digital Legal Deposit team. However the process is not fully automated, and it was necessary to define precisely what had to be checked, how, by whom and where in the process. For this entry process as for the others studied, the role of IT engineers has thus changed. Their role is not only to support the librarians by providing them tools, but to directly manage the collectionthis situation can be compared to that of digital preservation, where the direct administration of the repository is performed by engineers (implementing requirements and specifications expressed by librarians). Even though the role of library assistant has changed, it is no less important, as they need to check the quality of the collections at each step of the process. However, sampling is often necessary due to the huge amount of documents. To define the library assistant job itself and its responsibilities, it becomes necessary to establish a typology of these tasks: visual checks, verification of compliance or completeness, audit…

Problems of professional identity definitions

Interviews with professionals working on the five selected channels have highlighted some concerns which were later debated in a seminar. In addition to the two issues that were already identified (emergence of new actors and the transformation of the job of library assistants), two others were specifically raised: the sense of losing a connection with the document and the lack of perception of the entry process as a whole. The sense of losing a connection with the document is especially strong for actors controlling the flow of digital documents through aggregated datasome of them are even essentially dealing with financial and administrative statistics. These actors may perceive their work as being too abstract. On the other side, the quality assurance through visual checks of documents, despite its tedious side, allows a sense of ownership of the collection. To compensate for this loss of meaning, managers have to figure out how to distribute the processing of physical media and digital objects between teams. Dividing the workload and allocating it to separate groups of actors may lead to the perception that some tasks or channels are more highly regarded than others: a risk then exists of creating a gap between teams within the organization. Furthermore, it is perceived that reusing the skills and expertise acquired from handling physical entries (for instance knowledge of the periodicals publishing system) may be beneficial and more efficient for monitoring digital entries (for instance harvesting of online press in the context of legal deposit).

Finally, due to these revisions in the entry process, it is becoming difficult for the staff to develop a perception of this process as a whole. To reduce this lack of vision, the building of specific training programs has been a solution implemented not only for people directly involved in digital activities, but also managers and other departments.

The organization, skills and training of web curating teams

As the general assembly of the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) was being held in Paris this year1 , the members of ORHION thought it would be an excellent opportunity to compare and discuss practices with other institutions. Given the observatory's focus on changing professional identities, it submitted a workshop proposal on web archives curators. They were defined for this occasion as the people involved in developing and using web archives who are neither technicians dealing with operations and progress in hardware and software, nor researchers building knowledge out of them; people who are the necessary bridge between these two, and are often a bit of both.

The web curators' collections

First and foremost was the debate on the nature of web collections and the nature of the web curator role. Building a collection is a time-honored curator's vocation. When it comes to web archives, has going about it changed? When institutions have a legal deposit mandate to collect the web, it is often tied to a national or regional area. However, collecting documents according to their area of publication makes less sense in the internet environment, defined by infinite and international hyperlinks. Readers may have a hard time recomposing global coverage across institutions since many of them have to, or choose to, restrict access to their reading rooms. Others have underscored the need to take into account the technical specificities of a web crawl from the beginning and to integrate it as a criterion in the curators' crawl requests. Frequency and depth of crawl can be left to the curators to decide, and limitations of the crawling software should be understood and factored in at the time of selection (according to local implementations, some types of video content, content protected by password, and so on, cannot be collected). Whether sites at risk of disappearing should be preserved above others is a subject of debate. It seemed a more important factor in the beginnings of most programs, but has somewhat been played down. The most important goal has been building a meaningful collection, coherent within itself and supplementing existing collections' strengths. Columbia University Libraries2 for instance have a Human Rights Web Archive, the Avery Library Historic Preservation and Urban Planning collection, the Burke Library New York City Religions collection, and so on.

Most institutions have tried to build on their traditional areas of excellence and have curators select sites to collect thematically. Even so, ensuring the correspondence between curators' domains of expertise and their web selections can be tricky, as classification of websites is not always obvious. At one time, the Library of Congress tried out a "miscellaneous" web collection, hoping to broaden selections and curators' involvement, hoping that over time reasoned collections would naturally emerge, but this was not the case. Indeed, the biggest problem with collection building seems to be for the curators to add this task to their responsibilities, due to lack of time, resources or interest. Even when they are motivated and undeterred by technology, they still tend to work in short bursts where they initially pick out websites on a theme, then their involvement declines over time. As technical restrictions mean selections as to what can be collected have to be made even in a legal deposit context, the question of readers' best interests and input becomes prominent. Yet readers are still few as these types of collections are slowly getting discovered by researchers and the general public, a great part of the content is still available online and access and analysis tools are being refined. Curators have to guess what will be of use to the future generations, not a process usually found in libraries that receive legal deposit. Some institutions wonder whether direct readers input might be the way to go; Archive-it, the service provider arm of the non-profit internet library The Internet Archive, has developed such a program with K-12 students 3 .

The web curators' partners

These collection building choices have been formalized to a greater or lesser degree and communicated to the public 4 . They influence the way that institutions are organized to accomplish web collecting, preserving and access. Core web archiving teams are often part of dedicated digital services, especially when the programs are still in development. They can also be part of the legal deposit services (National Library of France, Royal Library of Denmark…), the collection services (Royal Library of the Netherlands, the British Library…) or acquisitions services (Library and Archives Canada). They are LIS and/or IT specialists, and collaborate with IT specialists, other curators as part of a selectors' network, and/or researchers.

Web curators have multiple strategies to make their collections known to researchers: it often falls to them to help translate the social sciences, history, or literature questions the researchers are trying to answer into queries that can be run in the web archive. They are the intermediaries between readers and IT specialists who can develop analysis tools, as the web collections' uses evolve from browsing documents and content site by site to data-mining.

The web curators' training

The curators working on web archives are rarely in direct contact with the general public in the reading rooms, and rely on colleagues for advocacy and troubleshooting. Yet, there are no specific courses on designing and managing web archives. Training is then tiered: the core team, requiring a higher degree of technical knowledge, needs to be in contact with colleagues from the seventy or so institutions engaged in web archiving, through international consortia and events such as IIPC 5 and iPRES. In turn, they train the curators associated with web collection building and coordinate their activities over time. The Library of Congress has for instance made web archives part of the core training on curators' duties. To enable all personnel to raise awareness of web archives and answer readers' queries, general information sessions should also be organized.

Lessons learnt about professional identities

Each of these three studies illustrates a different aspectat a different stageof digital curation: the second study deals with entry, the first study with bibliographic description, the third study with the initial and final steps of the chain: selection on one hand and promotion on the other hand. Also, different kinds of professionals were under scrutiny: library assistants, cataloguers and curators. And yet, is it possible to take a broader view and go beyond the specificities of these use cases, not striving to define precisely what digital curation is, but at least identifying some of its key trends?

A first conclusion of each of these studies is that the notion of a "digital collection" is not obvious. Digital documentation makes it necessary to reassess the notion of collection granularity: each subset of a document (a slide in a batch of pictures, a web page in an archived website…) is a document in itself, which may need a specific description. Professionals even tend to lose the very notion of document: when someone's activity is essentially related to figures and reports, is this still managing library collections? As librarians seeking to promote web archives acknowledged, readers may also have a hard time understanding the kind of documentation they are dealing with when faced with digital collections. Finally, the sheer diversity of digital documents (digitized and born-digital; acquired by the library temporarily or for the long-term) makes it difficult to figure out the unity of the institutional digital collection.

There are subsequently questions on the roles, responsibilities, and even professional identities of people in charge of digital curation. It is stated that librarians' "traditional" knowledge is still invaluable when it comes to digital documents: for instance cataloguing remains a critical part of librarians' activity (at least in a national library such as the BnF). The knowledge of news publishing required for library assistants to manage serials is also precious for their digital equivalents. However, typical distribution of roles between professional profiles is challenged: the assignment of descriptive metadata isn't the duty of cataloguers anymore; engineers replace library assistants at the heart of the document entry process. Curators working on web archives are still wondering what level of technical knowledge they need to acquire so as to adequately fulfill their mission. As this last example shows, organizational charts are often called into question by the emergence of new activities and evolving share of responsibilities.

As a matter of fact, treatment chains tend to be longer, more complex, and to involve more stakeholders. As they are more recent, these chains are less well-known and less intelligible for the various actors. Therefore, there is a risk that actors no longer recognize their place in the workflow, and that they don't understand why they are asked to perform one task or another. Training programs thus appear to be critical in order to tackle this issue. Digital curation of course requires technical training on digital documents specificities. It may however be considered that digital curation requires less a technical knowledge than a global understanding of production channels. Finally, several concerns were raised about the way to articulate work on analogue and on digital documents. Whatever the domain may be (metadata description, digital entries, web archives), the activity was at first experimental, with highly motivated pioneers. Involving whole teams in the activity is then as difficult as it was to initially launch it: however, sharing the workload between the first pioneers and the rest of the staff appears as a key to avoid creating a gap between the library's missions towards physical and digital collections.

Figure 1 :

 1 Figure 1: Entry process for physical documents

Figure 2 :

 2 Figure 2: Entry process for digitized documents (QA = quality assurance)

Figure 3 :

 3 Figure 3: Entry process for online newspapers

Program and presentations from the IIPC GA are available at http://netpreserve.org/generalassembly/2014/overview.

2 https://library.columbia.edu/bts/web_resources_collection.html

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank ORHION members and those who kindly reviewed the papers.


speaker Marianne Clatin

Louise Fauduet

Clément Oury

Watching the library change, making the library change? An observatory of digital influence on organizations and skills at the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Since 2010, the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) has been testing a new way of tracking the influence of handling its increasing digital collections on the way its librarians do their job. ORHION (observatoire des Organisations et Ressources Humaines sous l'Impact Opérationnel du Numérique: Organization and Human Resources under Digital Influence), is an informal -observatory‖ of challenges and practices in what is usually a very structured, even hierarchical, institution. In this paper, we propose to explain how the library experimented with atypical methods of sharing challenges and practices in the digital domain When the national library got a new major building and a complete reorganization in the 1990s, its digital projects were carried out by a dedicated Digital Library Department. But by the mid 2000s, digital had become mainstream: digital projects became digital routines, digital R&D became day-to-day operations. Thus, in 2008, the dedicated Digital Library Department disappeared into various other library services and operations. Digital was just one means among others for the library to fulfill its long-standing missions. However, with digital actions disseminated across the library, there was a lack of a centralized place to discuss shared difficulties and put experiences together. Throughout 2008 and 2009, the idea of an informal group of librarians interested in sharing their experience of the challenges digital collections posed to their daily activities was put to the test. This group progressively developed into something which was officially endorsed for the long term by BnF's top management in 2010, and yet unique in its structure and methods at the library, ORHION. It has fostered a spirit of openness about challenges caused by digital collections across the library, along with other concomitant initiatives. Its innovative way of working may be considered to have helped emerging needs and issues now being embraced across the library and its various entities as well as hierarchical levels.

Part I: The birth of a constellation "A radically new kind of library"

In the minds of those who first conceived it, the new -Bibliothèque de France‖ was supposed to be -a radically new kind of library‖, where digital collections and activities should hold a prominent place. The Digital Library Department was therefore created in 1998, the year when the -Bibliothèque nationale de France‖1 definitely moved into a new major building. This department was globally in charge of all activities related in one way or another to the digital world and the Web:

-Editorial and technical management of BnF's institutional website (www.bnf.fr).

-Editorial and technical management of BnF's intranet.

-Selection, cataloguing and digitization of material for Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr), BnF's digital library, launched in 1997. -Development of the digital library system for online access to this material. Everything was managed by the Digital Library Department, except the infrastructure and storage of the digital material for Gallica, which was in the hands of the IT Department. One year later, the Digital Library Department began giving thought to the legal deposit of online publication and web archiving. Digital collections management at BnF was therefore organized in a vertical way: all processes (selection, acquisition/digitization, cataloguing, access and soon preservation) were concentrated in a single entity. This entity mirrored the -traditional‖ library that was managing documents on physical media, but it was entirely separate.

From vertical to horizontal thought

This vertical organization was successful as it managed to promote Gallica in the mid 2000s as one of the leading online libraries. However, at this date, it appeared necessary to radically enhance the scale of the department's digitization activity. The main triggers were the increasing role of digital documentation and the development of high-speed Internet in France. The goal was also to keep pace with the digitization project announced by Google. If a single entity was to support alone such a charge, it would have become a fully different library, as big as the -traditional‖ BnF wasthus challenging the unity of the BnF's objectives and missions. On the other hand, as Gallica was no longer an experiment but a leading service of the library, it was obviously necessary to involve the whole library in its management. In order to bring traditional and digital-related library skills closer, a first series of organizational changes were implemented:

-The team in charge of digitization joined the Preservation and Conservation Department, thus facilitating the convergence of reproduction workflows and the shift from analogue (microforms) preservation reproductions to digital ones, and starting to integrate digital preservation as one of the main conservation strategies at BnF. -The team in charge of the selection and acquisition of books for Gallica was transferred to the Cooperation Department, thus emphasizing the evolution of the digital library towards shared selection workflow and tools at national level.

-The team in charge of managing the digital library's website and architecture joined the IT Department, which created a suitable environment for scalable processes and formal development methods. -The team in charge of the BnF's institutional website joined the Communication Delegation, thus acknowledging the website as a communication channel among others. A smaller digital library department remained: it was in charge of activities that were very specific to digital collections management. On the one hand was Web archiving, which was still a project and not yet a mission2 . On the other hand were activities related to what may be called -digital curation‖ (translated in French as -bibliothéconomie numérique‖, i.e. -digital librarianship‖). People in the digital curation team worked on innovative ways of referencing and accessing documents, and on digital preservation; both fields implying thorough knowledge of metadata. Therefore, the Digital Library department had become in the mid-2000s a kind of R&D department with experts involved in the use and the evolution of digital models and standards such as Dublin Core and OAI-PMH for access, the OAIS organizational model and METS for preservation, and the WARC file format for web archives storage.

The Digital Library Department legacy

A new series of modifications occurred at the beginning of 2008. At this date, mass digitization projects had proved their worth with hundreds of thousands of documents available; a new version of Gallica had been launched, as well as the development process of the software part of the BnF digital repository, SPAR (Scalable Preservation and Archiving Repository). As every part of the library was then involved in digital activities, the existence of a Digital Library Department was questioned. Discussions occurred in late 2007 about the future of this department, of its activities and its staff. The decision was taken by the BnF management board to dissolve it in April 2008 and to disseminate its goals and expertise:

-The Web archiving activity was attached to the Legal Deposit Department, with the birth of the -Digital legal deposit‖ service. The Legal Deposit Department was already in charge of collecting and indexing printed documents, to pass them on to the thematic departments which give access to them in reading rooms and manage relationships with the public. -The National Bibliographic Agency was reorganized in order to be an actor in digital curation activities. This implied broadening its functions, now involving digital information management as well as traditional bibliographic expertise, along with reinforcing its ties to the IT Department, then in the process of designing the information system. The importance of these modifications was highlighted by the department's new name: the Bibliographic and Digital Information Department. -Finally, the Conservation and Preservation Department strengthened its dedication to digital preservation, and fostered preservation expertise tasks.

On the other hand, the needs of the mass-digitization processes let many more departments be involved in tackling in digital issues. Staff working in BnF -collection‖ departments (i.e. those in charge of acquiring documents and of managing relationships with the general public and researchers) were entrusted with the difficult tasks of selecting the documents to be digitized, according to several legal, scientific and technical criteria, of ensuring that they were not damaged by digitization processes, and of performing some visual quality assurance. They were also progressively involved in the promotion of Gallica, notably by using blogs and social networks. Finally, the same departments were also involved in the selection and quality assurance activities of Web legal deposit.

These various ways of disseminating digital expertisealong with expert staffreally helped in elaborating common approaches for the management of digital as well as other publications.

It was proof that -digital was not different‖. However, professionals understood that this wellknown IFLA motto had also its dark side. Traditional librarianship issues cropped up again, still as complex, in the digital realm, and needed to be addressed: notably, how to guarantee collection quality, how to train librarians to deal with their new actions and responsibilities, and so on. And yet the disappearance of the Digital Library Department meant that there was no obvious place where these discussions could be held in cross-disciplinary ways by people in charge of the various aspects of digital content management.

Part II: ORHION, its methodology and actions

Throughout 2008 and 2009, the idea of an informal group of librarians interested in sharing their experience of the challenges digital collections posed to their daily activities was put to the test. The spark for such a group was a problem with the scope of a rights management tool that couldn't be solved without an extensive enquiry across the library to determine its potential users, which no structure was able to do at the time. While debating how this librarywide problem might best be solved, librarians working on the case felt that a larger problem was not being addressed: if digital issues were to be handled by the whole of the library, how did this actually happen, and did it change the way people did their jobs, or even the very nature of their jobs? So volunteers who were closely involved with the issues of digital preservation and rights management came to the human resources services with the concept of a working group studying the impact of the development of digital tasks in the library, and asked for their advice and support.

The group then progressively developed into something which was officially endorsed for the long term by BnF's top management in 2010, and yet unique in its structure and methods at the library. Its members are recruited by invitation for their experience and/or interest in dealing with digital collections and do not represent their department but themselves. They are picked from the whole library staff. In fact, ORHION has made a conscious and continuous effort to include representatives that do not come solely from the Direction of Services and Networks, which gathers de facto the agents dealing the most closely with day-to-day digital operations: IT, metadata models, digital libraries, digitization, and so on. The Direction of Collections, which is at the heart of the digital collection management, has provided an increasing number of members, and Human Resources have been eager to participate from the start, given that the study of changes in jobs and skills has been the main purpose of ORHION since its inception. But ORHION has recently recruited members from services which are not usually included in -technical‖ debates, such as International Relations or Strategy Delegation, in accord with the library's policy that digital issues should be disseminated across the BnF. The members are not top managers, the library policy-makers, but practitioners and middle managers. The purpose of this rule is to draw on personal experience of daily operations and processes, and some members have left the group as they have been promoted. Yet ORHION felt it was important to have sponsors in top management, such as the head of Human Resources, in order to warrant that it not be perceived as a loose canon and that it had a relay for its analyses.

The group operates outside existing BnF structures, since its role is to observe and articulate the changes in the librarians' practices and skills, not to elaborate the library's strategies. Yet it plays an important role in raising awareness through its four types of action:

interviews, to gather information on a given subject or work practice;

working groups, to analyze specific topicsone worked on charting the miscellaneous training programs on digital collections; workshops, where a few cases on a given theme, such as managing born-digital material, are presented to foster a discussion with a large number of participants; and last but not least, information for managers, through presentations of ORHION's work in management committees

Interviews

Interviews were used initially to better define the nature of the issues that ORHION members had perceived instinctively. Were the changes the library experienced due to new technologies or new management practices? Was there really such a thing as a digital influence on the way librarians do their job? In which ways was digital different, and ought it to be?

The first round of interviews was thus aimed at a dozen people considered to be key players in BnF's digital domain, to identify what the problems were, and to learn from the ideas and doubts expressed by the staff working in the digital domain. Six main wishes emerged: 1. clarify the institution's policy; 2. define priorities; 3. define what a digital collection is; 4. facilitate cross-disciplinary workflows; 5. develop skills; 6. analyze the evolutions of job qualifications.

While the first two wishes were the responsibility of the library's management, and the fifth wish would be covered by the work of the Training and Qualification Services, ORHION seemed to find a purpose in focusing on problems that were being felt at the operational level, and slowly coalescing as the library changed. What do people mean exactly when using the phrase -digital collection‖? How has the library made digital processes smoother, when they tend to require collaboration across BnF's departments and services? How do library workers perceive the changes in their job definitions and in their skill set?

In this spirit, the interviews in ORHION's 2012 program are meant to observe how the rapid switch from traditional to digital photography has impacted the job of photographer. The BnF has been host to reproduction services for decades, that over time have been part of the conservation services and/or the services to the readers. In time, the lack of maintenance and supplies for traditional film equipment, and increasing demand for digital reproduction, has made film all but disappear in the BnF, with some protest from the collections or the conservation departments. A panel of photographers was selected by managers in the Reproduction and Conservation departments to evaluate whether photographers were similarly ambivalent about the switch. The eight names put forward represent different types of training, careers and mindsets, and the first results reveal an overall welcoming of the changes, especially when highly technical skills about lightning and color are preserved, but a certain wariness towards the pressures of mass digitization. ORHION's series of interviews usually have two types of outcomes: an anonymous synthesis presented to the respondents, in order to give them a chance to see that they have not been misrepresented, and a bullet point presentation to managers and human resources who may be interested in integrating the results to their own reflections.

Working groups

Another way for ORHION to make headway on an issue is to create a small working group with both its permanent members and specialists invited to participate on their topic of expertise. One of these groups worked on listing the training sessions and tutorials on digital issues, which are organized by different services in the library and lack some coherence and scope. This task has since then gained visibility and been continued outside of ORHION, as befits the group's incubation and observation role.

Another working group tried to give a first definition of what a -digital collection‖ was in the BnF through the study of use cases which seemed to have at their heart such a collection. The aim was to flesh out the notion of -digital collection‖, which is used throughout the BnF without a precise understanding of its nature scope, through the description of concrete examples, such as resolving an error in a document of the digital library, Gallica, verifying the completeness of a Web archives collection, or accessing an audiovisual document that cannot be rendered with existing library players. This also helped to map out the various ways in which structures and individuals dealt with the multidisciplinary workflows that are one of the major issues in the digital domain identified by ORHION since its inception: how to communicate, how to find adequate tools, and so on. One of the main conclusions was that complexity in the library collections was inevitable, and digital collections were added layers of intricacy; planning for all the stages of the collections' lives, from acquisition to diffusion, and elucidating and documenting these workflows, was essential. Another point to clarify was the notion of quality applied to digital contents, and how it relates to the criteria for quality in the rest of the collection.

Seminars

This working group was spurred by the previous -seminars‖, and fed the following ones: seminars have been ORHION's most successful type of action in terms of visibility and impact. There have been six in the course of two years, and they mostly followed the same structure: a small number of people, two to six, are invited to share their experience on a given theme during the best part of an hour. Their presentations are followed by an hour of debate with a few dozen people, invited by ORHION from all parts of the library for their involvement in the matters discussed.

The audience is usually free of top managers, in order to reinforce the freedom of speech that prevails. The debates have always been lively, and those who attend appreciate the opportunity to exchange views with colleagues with whom they usually have little interaction, or simply the chance to vent their feelingswhich can be a risk to the productivity of discussions. So far, the presence of a moderator and of a minute-taker documenting points of view on screen, picked from ORHION's members, has been enough to keep the proceedings balanced.

From the anonymous minutes of the seminar, a synthesis is created by ORHION, and the presentations, the minutes and the synthesis are shared with the participants, who are then free to relay them to their colleagues. The themes discussed so far have been a comparison of digitization and Web archiving processes now that they are operating on a massive scale; a debate on whether the BnF's digital repository could be used for digital curation purposes; an analysis of the library's practices in interacting with readers, local and distant, around digital contents; an inventory of the diverse ways BnF deals with its born-digital collections; and two seminars aimed at presenting ORHION's observations to managers.

Relays

Since its creation, ORHION has indeed been intent on making its observation accessible throughout the library, since it is a group tasked with describing and analyzing what is, not a committee given decision-making powerswhich allows it to maintain objectivity, and not to perturb the BnF's existing structures. The final reports from its projects are public, and its activities are documented on the BnF's intranet. Special efforts have been made to present those results to the library's top management, so as to fit in with management's need for brevity and strategy, such as shorter reports emphasizing observations on organization and policies, or presentations within the BnF's top-level committees.

The gist of ORHION's conclusions so far may well be that the more things change, the more they remain the same: while the rise of digital content and technologies has not changed the essential missions of a librarycollect, organize, preserve, disseminate -, it forces the BnF to modify the ways it does so. And ORHION has tried to give a clearer picture of these evolutions within an institution where new projects and initiatives sometimes appear suddenly with the effervescence of novelty.

Part III: ORHION and its galaxy -ORHION's influence, and other initiatives

Having been formed by digital pioneers within the library, ORHION has sometimes appeared to its own participants to be a place where, out of their official department and structure, they could share with other colleagues coping with the same problems, which not everyone was yet facing. A kind of -digitalics anonymous‖ group, as the joke goes. A place where, focusing on important topics but far from the urgent daily cases of their own department, people could take time to discuss complex issues at a library level. Both members of the group and people taking part in the ORHION events were often stimulated, and even relieved, by the chance to discuss their obstacles and successes.

However, the whole of the BnF's reflection on digital issues does not take place within ORHION's monthly meetings or its other activities. ORHION's members do of course act within their own departments. And non-members of ORHION do think and talk about these issues as well, while posting or tweeting, and share with their colleagues, during training sessions related to these topics. But since the observatory has become more well-known through its different activities, the habit has been taken to talk of « a case for ORHION » whenever a case related to both digital and human issues occurs. The observatory name has even given birth to a new adjective and some situations are said to be -orhionesque‖... While ORHION's unorthodox rules may once have been the source of doubts on its legitimacy and utility, it has, however, fostered a spirit of openness about challenges caused by digital collections across the library, along with other concomitant initiatives. And as ORHION and its name have become more and more well-known, it is sometimes now unclear what is related to the observatory's activities and what is not, all the more so when ORHION members are involved in a new working group, as it was the case in three recently achieved initiatives.

Updating the official job and qualifications register

The last of the six wishes which had emerged from ORHION first round of interviews was to analyze the evolutions of the job qualifications.

The official register of jobs at the BnF was first created in 2005. All existing jobs are described, belonging to five different groups: public services and collections processing; administration; logistics; communication; management. Several reasons led to its modification seven years later, including the evolution of cataloguing functions, and one of them was the wish to take digital issues more into consideration. A formal study on positions and skills was then performed, paying special attention to the requirements of digital projects. It was, however, decided not to create new job descriptions, but build on existing skills and positions.

What is more, it appears that digital issues and activities come in addition to other already existing ones, and do not replace them yet. Since the missions remain the same, there is no reason so far to imagine entirely new positions, but it is important to describe new skills or processes existing onesuntil the need for some skills might some day disappear.

The job description of librarians in charge of collections was changed according to these principles. As far as acquisition is concerned, not only physical collections are now taken into account, but also digital ones, including those the library gives remote access to. Since the law on Web legal deposit that was recently passed, the librarians can also select Web content to be collected. And as well as taking part in digitization processes by selecting documents, they are expected to get involved in social networks to promote both digital collections and services.

The content of every position at the BnF was modified to a certain extent, but the one previously called librarian -in charge of documentary treatments‖ also had its title changed, becoming -in charge of documentary techniques and processes‖. As far as digital documents are concerned, the whole lifecycle of the document must indeed now be taken into account, for fear that we might soon be unable to access it. It is thus important to master all the processes the document went through, from initial data structure models to the different events which occurred through digitization or transformation into preservation formats. Not only description formats are important now, but also technical and rights management metadata. Not only library formats, but also the publishers' ones, and those of other communities we want to link with on the Web.

29 job and 60 special skills descriptions were revised before the new jobs register was made official in April 2012.

Developing skills

Since the BnF decided not to create new types of jobs, it was important to make sure everyone was able to adapt to an evolving positionas the fifth original wish of ORHION went, to -develop skills‖.

2009 saw the creation of a dedicated training curriculum in digital information management: metadata, digital libraries, digitization and digital preservation. The idea was first to draw the line between professional open-minded curiosity and actual operational needs. The library was indeed challenged by the blurring borders between previously well separated jobs, and the evolution of the relationship between the functional experts, developers and system administrators of the IT Department, and the majority of the librarians. A comprehensive and flexible training plan was then developed, mixing conferences to several dozens of people, training sessions on computers and smaller seminars where colleagues could share experiences on technical issues.

Classes on the basics of XML, RDF or SPARQL were added, and the more elaborate training program was called -Infonum‖ (which could be translated as -Diginfo‖) and built as progressive sessions: Infonum0 gave the basis of digital information; Infonum1 dealt with the data models of digital information; Infonum2A with the ways the library can develop services on the Web; Infonum2B explained who the remote public of the library is and dealt with accessibility; Infonum2C dealt with the new methodology of digital projects; Infonum3 explained the whole process required from digitization to preservation; Infonum4A dealt with quality management; and Infonum4B gave more explanations on digital preservation through the example of the BnF's preservation system SPAR.

Between 2009 and 2011, 700 BnF employees (out of 2600) attended at least one of these training sessions, all taught by high-level digital experts inside the library. Four years later, three observations could be made:

-People attending the training sessions often appreciate them, but since some topics are prospective, they cannot directly use the skills they develop after the sessions.

-Other topics are becoming less prospective and are therefore required knowledge for many more employees throughout the library than the experts are able to teach within the current training courses.

-What is more, while it was important, some years ago, to address these digital issues as new ones, it is now paramount that these topics be identified as part of standard 21 st century library issues, and thus integrated into the current librarians' standard training (as well as that of other people working at the library).

The different departments organizing training sessions on digital issues are now thus involved in reorganizing the training courses according to these perspectives :

-Some topics may no longer be addressed by training sessions, but rather as small lectures to a larger audience. The BnF organizes every week a midday -information hour‖ on special events at the library (exhibition, acquisition of a patrimonial collection, and so on). Some of these sessions may be dedicated to digital issues, and colleagues could attend more easily than for an official training session, without registration, during the lunch break. There could be an opportunity to give more information on digital projects that the BnF is developing or involved in; explain which new services are now made possible by the new developments in digitization techniques; or disseminate ideas on the different ways and places the librarians can use to promote their collections and services on the Web.

-Some other topics cannot really be considered as prospective anymore and should be part of already existing non-digital training attended by librarians according to their domain of expertise. Training that describes the library's collections to staff in charge of acquisitions may now deal with the digital library as well as the physical one and describe the way Internet legal deposit, Gallica and electronic resources are selected according to the classic documentary chart of the BnF. The training designed for staff in charge of collection preservation might also include an explanation of SPAR, the BnF's digital preservation system, now part of the whole BnF's preservation plan.

-Some other issues should still be identified as digital ones, but no longer from a technical point of view, rather as part of a broader library culture. However different their jobs may be, managers from different departments should be able to share the same digital basis. The same is true for curators, however different their collections may be, and as well for cataloguers or stack holders. A single training session specially designed for each of these four families of positions might be the opportunity to give to each of them a digital culture adapted to the special issues of their job. A specific session might even be included in the mandatory training course every new employee is expected to attend, which would allow all the nonlibrarian employees of the BnF to fully understand what the library is now coping with. And besides these three ways of disseminating digital information throughout the library there will of course remain specific digital training designed to have people fit the new skills now officially quoted in the new official position register of the BnF.

Digital BnF: horizon 2015

Besides these initiatives led at an operational level, the BnF's top management decided to experiment with a new way of working to cope with digital issues. As ORHION had already been working for three years, its observations could now be taken into account to fulfill the first original wish of its founders: -clarify the institution's policy‖. This is what the special seminars called -BnF numérique: horizon 2015‖ were meant to do. Questions about BnF orientations on the various aspects of digital influence were to be addressed by four working groups concentrating on four main themes (more or less following the document processing workflow): 1: Documentary chart, acquisitions and collection processing under digital influence. 2: Preservation and circulation under digital influence.

3: Mediation and promotion of the digital collections. 4: Organization and human resources under digital influence Each working group of a dozen people was chaired by a top manager. The other participants were either experts at an operational level or head librarians, on the ORHION model, but at a higher hierarchical level. As with the observatory, non-librarians also participated: functional experts, programmers, lawyers, members of the Human Resources Department... Department directors involved in the groups were asked to regularly report to the top management and to each other, so that contradictions between the group orientations be identified as soon as possible. They were also expected to give information within their own department about this original experience. Five meetings were organized in each group during a three-month period in the first semester of 2012. It was made explicit that the groups were not supposed to start from scratch, but should learn from the achievements and current reflections already formalized through official documents: a report on ebooks, the recently updated documentary chart, the cataloguing committee working group, the project for a new catalog, a study on the Gallica users, as well as some of ORHION's notes. Each group wrote a report for the BnF's direction on the specific issues it was dealing with. A synthesis of them is now expected from the top management to be first detailed to the seminars' participants, then to the whole library.

Although the conclusions of the seminars are still unknown so far, most participants already consider that they were a success, from an -orhionesque‖ point of view. Digital stacks, Web mediation, differentiated processing of collections according to their different originsall these issues were ones the observatory had already identified as -hot topics‖. Since seminars' participants were of, on average, on a higher hierarchical level than those of ORHION's members, -only‖ 7 members were invited to be part of the 50 participants. As the seminars' conclusions converged with ORHION's, it might be taken for granted that some of the observatory's reflections are now a common ground shared by several policy-makers.

Conclusion

The first of the six wishes ORHION expressed four years ago might be about to be satisfied by the results of these -BnF horizon 2015‖ seminars. The fourth group, dealing with human resources issues, insisted on the positive role of the observatory as an analysis tool for changes. This might then confirm the role of ORHION in the library's new digital strategies, having it work on acquisition or cataloguing positions, according to the experience it has acquired in studying jobs already wholly affected by digital issues, such as the current analysis regarding photographers.

What is more, the success encountered by these seminars might prove the relevancy of ORHION's model: a group mixing both librarians and non-librarians, operational experts and managers, whether of top or middle level. As far as digital or IT issues are concerned, a gap is always possible between experts and policy-makers. While the latter are sometimes suspected of not paying enough attention to what are first considered as mere technical problems, there is a risk of a tyranny of the experts, who may find themselves in the situation of taking decisions only they can understand. It is thus paramount to develop places where operational experts and managers can share enough information to enable management to translate digital issues into strategies.

The -Bibliothèque nationale de France‖ or National Library of France comes from the merging of the previously existing -Bibliothèque nationale‖ and the -Établissement public de la Bibliothèque de France‖, a dedicated public institution created in order to design the new Library.

The first experiments on Web archiving started seven years before the law on digital legal deposit was passed, on August 1st, 2006..