Institut National de l'Audiovisuel

The Institut national de l'audiovisuel (or INA, French for National Audiovisual Institute) is a repository of all French radio, television, and audiovisual archives. Additionally, it provides free access to archives of countries such as Afghanistan and Cambodia. It has its headquarters in Bry-sur-Marne. INA, was founded in 1974, after the dissolution of the Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF). Since then, it has been active in archive management, training, research and production. In 1978, it became one of the founding members of the International Federation of Television Archives (FIAT/IFTA) with the BBC (United Kingdom) and the RAI (Italy). In 1992, INA was entrusted with the legal deposit for all French radio and television channels. The Inathèque de France was launched in 1995 and set up its Consultation Centre at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in 1998. One year later, INA launched a vast plan to preserve and digitise all the images and recordings it managed. The aim was to combat the deterioration of physical archive formats and to promote multimedia use of the archives. INA’s pioneering approach made France the worldwide reference in the field. 2004 was the year that INA launched Inamediapro.com which is used by audiovisual professionals to conduct research, select and order archives. It facilitates access to the world’s largest audiovisual archive database. By 2006, INA launched the ina.fr website, which gave the general public access to over 100,000 radio and television programmes. Since then, it has allowed free online consultation of some materials on this website with a search tool indexing 100,000 archives of historical programs, for a total of 20,000 hours. In 2007, Ina SUP, an audiovisual and digitisation faculty was opened, offering two specialised Master's courses. In 2012, Ina was officially entrusted with the legal deposit of the French Web media and, as of 2016, retains more than 14,000 media websites. 

Reproduction is possible if it is for personal use or scientific work after explicitly asking for permission from INA.  

INA holds fonds and collections regarding radio, TV, and audiovisual material from 1945 until the present. INA also holds written archives regarding all the preparatory work for television shows, research for radio, transcripts of interviews, etc. It also has quite an extensive web-media archive that collects URL's of different news sites and archives them.  

Consultation of INA materials not freely available on the website is only permitted after the researcher has obtained BNF and INA accreditation. BNF and Ina accreditations are issued by the accreditation service. Researchers need to provide the service with proof of identity and an pre-accreditation form outlining their research project. The form can be downloaded here: http://www.inatheque.fr/consultation/formulaire-pre-accreditation.html Once accreditation has been granted, researchers must then purchase a BNF Research Pass costs between 5 and 50 euros, depending on length of the pass' validity, in order to gain access to the reading room. Discounts may apply. For more information on the Research Pass fees, see: https://www.bnf.fr/fr/tarifs-de-loffre-lecture-et-de-loffre-culture?first_Art=non#bnf-biblioth-que-de-recherche