Within the Department of Architecture and Heritage and since 1964, the mission of the Sub-Directorate of Documentation and Inventory Studies consists of enumerating, studying and creating awareness about the architectural and movable heritage of France - in other words, any work that is an element of its national heritage because of its artistic, historical, archaeological and ethnological character. This operation calls for centralized organization in order to define the direction that the work should take and to validate the work undertaken, as well as strong regional linkages. The work itself is carried out within the framework of topographical or thematic inventories in each of the regions of the metropolis and of overseas territories.

The results of the studies are available at the national level as well as the regional level, at the heritage documentation centers, in the form of dossiers and publications (collections: "Cahiers du patrimoine", "Images du patrimoine", "Itinéraires du patrimoine" and "Indicateurs du patrimoine"), or on consulting the Ministry of Culture's databases. The Mérimée database is devoted to architecture and the Palissy database to movable objects.