Body
The BnF provides a dataset containing the URLs of websites captured during French electoral collections from 2002 to 2024. [source: bnf-web-electoral] This dataset includes approximately 55,000 URLs of sites, blogs, and social media accounts related to 21 French elections, including presidential, legislative, municipal, European, regional, and departmental elections. [source: bnf-web-electoral] Each URL is accompanied by descriptive elements such as affiliated parties, geographic level, typology used for selection, and attached keywords, as well as technical collection parameters like collection depth and frequency, and the URL’s collection history. [source: bnf-web-electoral]
The selection of sites is not intended to be exhaustive, but has been carried out since 2002 by librarians from the BnF’s collection departments and establishments responsible for printer’s legal deposit. [source: bnf-web-electoral] A common selection framework ensures the continuity of the corpora and the pluralism of selections, with a concern for political neutrality and representativeness of the collections. [source: bnf-web-electoral] The classification framework includes official and institutional sites, candidates and their organizations (including campaign sites, political formations, and other support organizations), and views and opinions on the campaign (including directories, observatories and analyses, traditional media, associations, unions and other organizations, and individual and community expressions on the internet). [source: bnf-web-electoral]
The selected URLs serve as starting points for site collection, carried out using the Heritrix robot. [source: bnf-web-electoral] Under the Heritage Code (Article L132-2-1), the BnF is authorized to disregard the robot exclusion protocol set by certain sites, also known as robots.txt. [source: bnf-web-electoral] The dataset is available in CSV and XLS formats, with accompanying texts in RTF, compressed in ZIP folders. [source: bnf-web-electoral]
Use it for
A campaigner can use this dataset to identify and analyze the online presence of political actors across multiple French elections from 2002 to 2024. [source: bnf-web-electoral] By examining the URLs and their descriptive elements, a campaigner can study the evolution of digital campaigning strategies, track the online activities of candidates and political parties, and observe how different types of organizations—from official institutions to individual expressions—have participated in electoral discourse over time. [source: bnf-web-electoral]