The public and audiovisual archives are divided into five sections: 
The general public archives contain documents, mostly in French language, which cover the history of the ICRC since its foundation in 1863 until 1975;
The Tracing Agency archives, which feature data about individuals, are technically open to the public until the 1950s.
However, they are not open to general consultation as people have to go through the ICRC's tracing archivists.
The only exception are all individual records relating to some two million prisoners of WWI- especially records of capture, of transfers between camps and of deaths in detention - which were made accessible online.
The index cards primarily deal with the Western, Romanian and Serbian Fronts.
Consultation of files on PoW and civilian internees during the Spanish Civil War or the Second World War requires specific skills.
Hence, anyone can request information on an individual but the archives accept only a limited amount of requests per year because of limited resources.
The tracing archives' files about people caught up in more recent conflicts are closed to the public, but the person visited in detention or their family can obtain information upon request.

The photo library and archives contain more than 800,000 images from the ICRC's global activities since the 1860s.
About 125,000 of them have been made available to the public in digital format.

The film archives contain, as of early 2020, around 5,000 titles with some 1,000 hours of footage covering the ICRC's humanitarian work in conflicts around the world from 1921 to the present day, in a range of formats (video, 35 mm and 16 mm film).

The audio archives hold more than 10,000 digitized sound files with thousand of hours of content, starting in the second half of the 1940s.

The archives also hold private collections of documents that were deposited by former members of the Committee and delegates.

As of early 2020, the ICRC archives held approximately:
9 million digital documents,
19 linear kilometers of shelf space for paper records,
34 terrabytes of audiovisual electronic media, and
41 million index cards about individual persons from the two World Wars.

About 1.500 researchers on average consult the archives and library collections - both public and closed ones - every year.

For 2019, the archives counted around 1.4 million page views on its websites.
In the course of the same year, its staff handled about 11,000 requests, both external and internal ones.
The public and audiovisual archives are divided into five sections: 
The general public archives contain documents, mostly in French language, which cover the history of the ICRC since its foundation in 1863 until 1975;
The Tracing Agency archives, which feature data about individuals, are technically open to the public until the 1950s. However, they are not open to general consultation as people have to go through the ICRC's tracing archivists. The only exception are all individual records relating to some two million prisoners of WWI- especially records of capture, of transfers between camps and of deaths in detention - which were made accessible online. The index cards primarily deal with the Western, Romanian and Serbian Fronts. Consultation of files on PoW and civilian internees during the Spanish Civil War or the Second World War requires specific skills. Hence, anyone can request information on an individual but the archives accept only a limited amount of requests per year because of limited resources. The tracing archives' files about people caught up in more recent conflicts are closed to the public, but the person visited in detention or their family can obtain information upon request.
The photo library and archives contain more than 800,000 images from the ICRC's global activities since the 1860s. About 125,000 of them have been made available to the public in digital format.
The film archives contain, as of early 2020, around 5,000 titles with some 1,000 hours of footage covering the ICRC's humanitarian work in conflicts around the world from 1921 to the present day, in a range of formats (video, 35 mm and 16 mm film).
The audio archives hold more than 10,000 digitized sound files with thousand of hours of content, starting in the second half of the 1940s.
The archives also hold private collections of documents that were deposited by former members of the Committee and delegates.
As of early 2020, the ICRC archives held approximately:
9 million digital documents,
19 linear kilometers of shelf space for paper records,
34 terrabytes of audiovisual electronic media, and
41 million index cards about individual persons from the two World Wars.
About 1.500 researchers on average consult the archives and library collections - both public and closed ones - every year.
For 2019, the archives counted around 1.4 million page views on its websites. In the course of the same year, its staff handled about 11,000 requests, both external and internal ones.
International Committee of the Red Cross archives