Curating Born-Digital Archives at the National Library of France: the Amos Gitai collection’s Case Study

Rime Touil, Bibliothèque nationale de France (France)

In 2018, the Performing Arts Department of the National Library of France received an exceptional donation from director Amos Gitaï comprising his entire physical and digital archives surrounding his film Rabin, The Last Day (2015). Representing almost 19 TB of data including text files, photographs, sound files, web pages and most of all, videos, covering all stages of the film’s creation from the script writing to its final editing, this collection poses unprecedented scientific and technical challenges. The massive number of documents and the wide variety of formats they represent, as well as the skills required to handle them, raised the question of the processes to use to identify these archives, to make them available to the public and, ultimately, to preserve them on the long term, bringing into light the tension that can exist between preservation requirements and the need for easily accessible archives. To accommodate this kind of complex digital collection, the BnF reflected on new tools specifically designed for born-digital archives, one of them being an application dedicated to the curating of born-digital archives, called TriNum. Conceived to enable the classifying, the annotation and the creation of preservation units, as well as to manage and trace the transformations carried out on these documents prior to their preservation, this interface keeps evolving to meet the challenges raised by the numerous born-digital collections received by the BnF these past few years. This lecture intends to present the state of the art on digital curating at the BnF while displaying the methodology, solutions and strategies implemented during the processing of the Amos Gitai collection.

Rime Touil is a digital curator at the Performing Arts department of the National Library of France (BnF). She is in charge of the coordination of digitalization programs and digital projects the department is currently involved in, as well as taking part in the development of a processing workflow for born-digital documents at the BnF. She is also taking part in working groups on digital archives and formats