Paris, France The Bibliotheque nationale de France had its beginnings in the royal library of Charles V in 1368. The National Library of France (BnF) became the first free public library in 1793 as political change and revolutionary spirit led to an expansion of public access to knowledge.

As many national libraries work towards preserving, maintaining and expanding access to scholarly works and valuable original documents the BnF has launched an ambitious initiative to expand its digital services by establishing a Distributed Archiving and Preservation System (SPAR) based on the Fedora platform. A pdf version of BnF’s use cases and analysis entitled, “Distributed Archiving and Preservation System Bibliotheque Nationale de France” may be downloaded here: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/spar/CCTP_SPAR-REA_Annexe1-en.pdf.

The Bibliotheque nationale de France has chosen Atos Origin to build SPAR. The first release is planned to be delivered at beginning of 2009.

BnF and Atos Origin are currently defining interfaces for the SPAR system, particularly for ingest features in order to handle packages as opposed to fedora objects (meaning one OAIS package can generate several fedora objects).

For more information please contact Maxime Aimetti or Charlotte Fabre at Atos Origin, and Thomas Ledoux or Jerome Dupont at BnF.