The National Library of France (BnF) has set up in January a collection dedicated to Covid19. It started with the follow-up of hashtags such as #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus or #CoronavirusEnFrance that were then appearing on Twitter.
The Covid-19 collection follows the evolution and the global impact of the pandemic on the French web. It tries to cover all the facets of the health crisis, via its medical and scientific aspects, but also its social, economic and political aspects, or even its cultural and moral aspects.
To this end, "the digital legal deposit team selects content by ensuring that the websites, blogs and social media archived form a coherent, meaningful and representative whole. It also determines the frequency of the collections made through robots - several times a day for social networks, once a day for national and regional press sites, etc.
This approach is not unprecedented for the BnF, which regularly organizes so-called "ephemeral news" collections in order to capture the repercussions of an event on the web and social networks, as was the case during the "yellow vests" movement or the Notre-Dame fire. By mid-April, the Covid-19 collection covered nearly 2,000 sources, and included many pages that have already disappeared from the living web.
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