Integrating physical preservation and digitization: a currently effective process in the French National Library

In a few years, mainly from its priority mass-digitization programmes, the French National Library (BnF) built very huge digital collections, which are growing still very quickly. Its digital library Gallica has already more than 2 million documents. Therefore the costs of digital preservation are increasing very fast: BnF digital repository, SPAR, has more than 2 400 To, from increasingly various types of documents. In the same time, budgets for physical preservation are decreasing very quickly because of the economic crisis, and the staff is increasingly dedicated to digitization programmes. In this difficult context, the Conservation Department (DSC), which is coordinating both digitization and physical preservation, is trying to reduce the global cost and the fall of activity in physical preservation by using each of the two types of conservation in aid of the other type. As digitization is obviously the priority, with a far larger budget, the strategy is to adjust and organize digitization programmes in order to compensate as much as possible for the decreasing of physical conservation activities: - Despite mass digitization requirements are generally considered to be difficult to reconcile with good conservation conditions for the original documents, BnF progressively advances (even in contracts run by private companies) from a digitization aiming at highlighting the collections to a true “preservation digitization”, for which damaged, brittle or very frequently communicated documents can be selected and are more protected against digitization damaging effects: We are more and more demanding in our contracts : We require non-damaging scanning equipment, high-quality pictures and file formats, we forbid 180° opening scanning for most documents, we check carefully the conditions of documents before and after digitization ; the contracts prescribe penalties when documents are damaged; a common training is systematically given to all staff from BnF and from the service providers involved in the programmes. Skilled restorers have been recruited for training and watching of the physical conditions of documents. We set up an audit process for an efficient and cheap control of digitization quality; the files from digitized documents get a high quality level of supervision in our digital repository. - Toward a physical preservation taking digitization into account: We created integrated circuits combining physical and digitization treatments, the ones realized according to the others. For example, digitization is often immediately completed by a box to improve the preservation conditions of the original document; brittle documents get a physical preparation to make easier or even possible digitization. Two specialized workshops have been set up to prepare newspapers and printed books. More and more often, we choose to digitize documents which would have been rather restored a few years ago, and nowadays we don’t restore any more all the documents which have been damaged by digitization. From now on, the head of the BnF emergency plan will coordinate the policies of risk management both for physical and for digital collections. Lastly, the public will not have access any more to the original documents (excepted for exceptional grounds) after digitization. The presentation will give an overview of these measures or projects, without hiding their drawbacks and limits.