Keeping Pace: Exploring New Methods to Preserve Today’s Digital Maps at the Bibliothèque nationale de France

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Notes

1 Gallica, the online portal of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), hosts 66,000 maps held in BnF collections and provides access to more than 15,000 digitized maps held in the collections of partner institutions.

2 Institut National de l’Information géographique et forestière, the French national mapping agency.

3 On the implementation of emulation strategy in the audiovisual archive of the BnF, see Gregory Miura, ‘Pushing the boundaries of traditional heritage policy: maintaining long-term access to multimedia content’, IFLA Journal 33:4 (2007): 323–26 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0340035207086058). The BnF was also part of the EU KEEP emulation program (2012: https://emuframework.sourceforge.net/).

4 Loi n° 2006-961 du 1 août 2006 relative au droit d'auteur et aux droits voisins dans la société de l'information (https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/id/JORFTEXT000000266350); and LOI n° 2021-1901 du 30 décembre 2021 visant à conforter l'économie du livre et à renforcer l’équité et la confiance entre ses acteurs (https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT0000446378920). Another decree for law-enforcement provisions is currently under scrutiny. See the updated Code du patrimoine (Heritage Code), Chap 2: ‘Modalities and organization of legal deposit, Article L132-2’, which lists persons subject to legal deposit (https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI000044796425/2023-03-01).

5 Bertrand Caron et al., ‘Experiment, document & decide: a collaborative approach to preservation planning at the BnF’, 12th International Conference on Digital Preservation (iPRES), Chapel Hill, North Carolina (US), November 2015 (https://hal-bnf.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01288699/document). See also, BnF, SPAR (Système de Préservation et d'Archivage Réparti), https://www.bnf.fr/fr/spar-systeme-de-preservation-et-darchivage-reparti.

6 Computer assisted design georeferenced vector images are used in France for cadastral mapping (DXF format) and elsewhere by other mapping agencies, such as the Spanish IGNE. The Library of Congress publishes reference guidelines, and an Open Preservation Foundation comparison table (2022) shows that the topic is widely addressed among respondents (https://openpreservation.org/resources/member-groups/international-comparison-of-recommended-file-formats/ ).

7 See Groupe Formats de la BNF, ‘Formats de données pour la préservation à long terme: la politique de la BnF’ (Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 2021), https://www.bnf.fr/sites/default/files/2021-04/politiqueFormatsDePreservationBNF_20210408.pdf.

8 As in Cartomundi, the French common catalogue for map series: http://www.cartomundi.fr/site/CDxx.aspx.

9 The OFTS (SwissTopo), for example, offers its vector digital cartographic model (DKM in German) plus symbology as a topographic map similar to the raster map (https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/geodata/maps.html).

10 Rong Liu, Jinling Wang and Bingqi Zhang, ‘High definition map for automated driving: overview and analysis’, Journal of Navigation 73:2 (2020): 324–41.

11 Mamane Nouri Sabo, Yvan Bédard, Bernard Moulin et al., ‘Toward self-generalizing objects and on-the-fly map generalization’, Cartographica 43:3 (2008): 155–73, at 157–58. 

12 Michael P. Peterson, ‘The tile-based mapping transition in cartography’, in László Zentai and Jesús Reyes Nunez, Maps for the Future: Children, Education and Internet (Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer, 2012), 151–63 (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-19522-8_13).

13 Marcy Bidney and Georgia Brown, ‘Considerations in collecting born-digital maps’, Imago Mundi 75:1 (2023): 122–26, at 124.

14 Christopher Fleet, ‘Curating born-digital maps’, Imago Mundi 75:1 (2023): 118–22, describes the same problem.

15 Such a scheme would be technically feasible with open-source programs and data publishers. Working with the open-source OpenStreetMap France, the BnF/Cartes et Plans has studied this problem and proven that solutions can be developed.

16 In the spirit of parsimonious preservation see Tim Gollins, ‘Parsimonious preservation: preventing pointless processes’, Online Information, 2009 Proceedings, Day 2–Track 3 (https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/parsimonious-preservation.pdf).

17 A petabyte is 1,024 terabytes; it would take 745 million floppy disks or 1.5 million CD-ROM discs to store this amount of data. See Lifewire.com, https://www.lifewire.com/terabytes-gigabytes-amp-petabytes-how-big-are-they-4125169#toc-how-big-is-a-petabyte. The two BnF digital archives, Audiovisual and SPAR, store only 7.5 petabytes of data for all times and domains combined (books digitalization, web contents, video, sounds, etc.).

18 The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has released a standard for styles based partly on the work of Jacques Bertin; see Olivier Ertz, et al. ‘OGC symbology conceptual model: core part’ (Open Geospatial Consortium, 2020: https://arodes.hes-so.ch/record/7097/usage).

19 For example, we provide maps for multiscale navigation studies as the ‘Lost in Zoom project’. Guillaume Touya et al. ‘Please, help me! I am lost in zoom’, in 30th International Cartographic Conference (ICC 2021) 14–18 December 2021, Florence, Italy, vol. 4 (Copernicus Publications, 2021) (https://hal.science/hal-03522053/).

20 This approach is theorized for video games. See Hugo Montembeault and Simon Dor, ‘À quoi pensent les archives de la jouabilité?’ Conserveries mémorielles [Online], no. 23 (2018), http://journals.openedition.org/cm/3171.

21 The ArchiveWeb.page (https://webrecorder.net/tools#archivewebpage) tool was developed by Ilya Kreymer.