History (1999): National Library of France With Enormous Storage

The Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BNF) or French National Library, officially opened several months ago in Paris, is an enormous new ultra-modern multimedia library which partially replaces the venerable old Bibliotheque Nationale (BN).

For the publishing collection, 86,000 works or microforms, roughly 22 million pages, were scanned to prevent deterioration, which represents 2TB of data recorded on 4mm DAT media by external contractors who were also responsible for indexing. The data were subsequently transferred to 5.25-inch MO disks placed in jukeboxes which will be connected to consultation stations.

To guarantee a maximum lifespan for the information, everything is also being transferred by the French firm Digipress to 3,400 CDs in engraved glass (the so-called Century Disks), capable of extremely long term preservation, to be stored at another site.

More specifically, the contents of the 4mm DAT tapes will initially be stored on Exabyte 8mm cartridges, which in turn will be used as CD matrixing units.

Emass-Grau France has also signed a sweet deal with the BNF for a library of no less than 11,560 audio CDs comprising 40 drives, yet another with 4,000 VHS cassettes and 32 VCRs, with both libraries connected to consultation stations for the public, and finally a mixed library containing both CD and VHS media devoted to research stations.

Emass also signed a deal with TF1, the largest French television station. The contract concerns an automatization solution to manage the stations’ video archives, built around IBM 3590 cartridges in a robot, using AMASS, a virtual disk software that simulates a standard disk in an HSM environment.

The French subsidiary, which is now part of the ADIC, has seen its business results grow by 45% from 1997 to 1998, €2.10 million to €3.05 million, and should climb to €3.81 million this year, according to the company.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 132 on January 1999 from the former paper version of Computer Data Storage Newsletter.