The Human Face of Digital Preservation: Organizational and Staff Challenges, and Initiatives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France

The process of setting up a digital preservation repository in compliancy with the OAIS model is not only a technical challenge: libraries also need to develop and maintain appropriate skills and organizations. Digital activities, including digital preservation, are nowadays moving into the mainstream activity of the Library and are integrated in its workflows. The Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) has been working on the definition of digital preservation activities since 2003. This paper aims at presenting the organizational and human resources challenges that have been faced by the library in this context, and those that are still awaiting us. The library has been facing these challenges through a variety of actions at different levels: organizational changes, training sessions, dedicated working group and task forces, analysis of skills and processes, etc. The results of these actions provide insights on how a national library is going digital, and what is needed to reach this longstanding goal. Dissemination of skills and tasks The Digital Library Department was created within the BnF in 1998, and more or less retained all activities related in one way or another to the digital world and the Web: – Web archiving first experiments – Selection, cataloguing and digitization of material for Gallica (http://gallica.bnf.fr), BnF's digital library – Development of the digital library system for online access to this material – Editorial and technical management of BnF's institutional website (www.bnf.fr) – Editorial and technical management of BnF's intranet. Only the infrastructure and storage of the digital material for Gallica wasn't managed by the Digital Library Department, but by the IT Department. By then, the approach was to isolate and to preserve digital activities from the traditional workflows of entries, cataloguing, access and reference. Digital definitely meant "different". A first step towards dissemination It took a decade to shift from this vision to the current situation, where digital activities are closely articulated with traditional library skills. A series of organizational changes were achieved: – the team in charge of digitization joined the Preservation and Conservation Department, thus facilitating the convergence of reproduction workflows and the shift from analog (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 BnF's institutional website joined the Communication Delegation, thus acknowledging the website as a communication channel among others.