Chronic. Sending back hundreds of thousands of illegal or unemployed immigrants, reducing excessively heavy taxes, increasing excessively low wages, multiplying “green” megawatts… Election campaigns are fond of statistics delivered with militant certainty. Then comes the moment when the journalist or the opponent asks, with a greedy irony, to “encrypt” the promise. Under the avalanche of percentages and millions, the citizen voter sometimes tends to zap to the nearest Netflix series.
He could also consult with profit the website of the Digital Library of Official Statistics (BNSP)online since September 21, 2021. This is a joint initiative of the National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee), the Ministerial Statistical Services (SSM), the National Library of France (BNF ) and the National Council for Statistical Information (CNIS, the consultation body between producers and users of official statistics).
Researchers, students and journalists were, until then, faced with a very French difficulty: each ministry producing its own statistical studies (employment, health, economy, finance, education, agriculture, etc.), it was necessary to explore the publications of each other on their respective sites, or from their documentation and press services. Not to mention the INSEE surveys, national but also… regional, since INSEE has branches in each region, each producing their own surveys at this geographical scale.
In addition, after a certain time, the publications of the SSM and a good part of those of INSEE disappeared from their sites to be transferred to the National Archives. They were then only accessible via the digital archive site of the BNF, Gallica. However, INSEE kept its own archives in the Alain-Desrosières library (1940-2013), named after an INSEE administrator known for having developed a (self-)critical vision of statistics, its methods and of its tools, crossing for that the approaches of the sociologist, the historian and the philosopher.
Cross sources on the same subject
The BNSP, administered by Insee, now brings all of this together under the umbrella of a single search tool: by theme, by region, by producing service and by date – the oldest publications date from 1827. There are nearly 40 000 documents which are thus delivered to the public and to researchers.
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