MACROSISDATA: safeguarding and promoting the heritage of French macroseismic surveys carried out between 1921 and 1996

Abstract Macroseismic surveys are of great interest to both the scientific community and the authorities.The aim of the MACROSISDATA project is to safeguard, disseminate, and promote through an online database the macroseismic survey documents collected by the French Central Seismological Bureau between 1921 and 1996. During this period, a total of 1428 earthquakes were surveyed to estimate macroseismic intensities (severity of ground shaking) by sending paper forms to the municipal authorities. This unique collection of forms, letters, maps, newspaper articles, and macroseismic reports amounts to 29 linear meters of archival paper documents. The 5-year MACROSISDATA project (2020–2025) consisted of 9 stages, from inventorying archival documents to online publication of digitized documents on a national website. The last stage will be implemented at the end of 2025. The stages were developed with the support of the archives department of the University of Strasbourg, comply with French archive management rules, and adopt a strategy that makes the data easily findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). In this article, we describe each stage in detail.