Essai

Du dépôt légal colonial à un patrimoine partagé

Histoire du fonds Indochinois de la Bibliothèque nationale

Vy Cao

This essay recounts the history of the BnF’s Indochinese collection (“fonds Indochinois”), which originated from the colonial legal deposit system that operated with remarkable consistency between 1922 and the early 1940s. This context, marked by the emergence of Vietnamese printing houses in the Indochinese peninsula, yields an substantial body of work, mostly in romanized Vietnamese. Lately, cooperation and digitization programs have transformed public and scientific access to the collection, while exposing new challenges such as the encoding of diacritics, the heterogeneity of records, the limitations of OCR, and the difficulties...