Customer testimonial
Archives Nationales simplify access to digitisation
In charge of centralizing French national archives and ensuring their free access to the population for over 200 years, the Archives Nationales collect, classify and conserve old documents, many of which are several centuries old. Communication is probably the most fundamental aspect of this institution's remit. It is entrenched in the following declaration, "society has the right of requesting account from any public agent of its administration", set out in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
Very early on, the Archives Nationales therefore set up reading rooms to give access to the documents in their keeping. With the help of technological progress, it is now possible to ask for photocopies or scans of documents in such situations as the justification of people's rights, documentation for scientific research or to assist history lovers and genealogists. In order to improve the quality of reproductions but also to optimize the process, the Archives Nationales have acquired a new scanner for its Paris site, the SupraScan Quartz A1 600 dpi HD made by the French company, i2s, a solution recommended and implemented by Spigraph.
Conserving original documents and optimizing quality
The Parisian Archives Nationales site includes two buildings separated by around 300 metres, linked up by underground passages. The former scanner was located in the library whereas most scanning requests are processed on the consultation site. It was therefore often necessary to take precious and delicate documents through the passages, which was neither practical nor recommended for archive conservation. It was thus decided to equip the consultation site with a scanner adapted to the type of documents processed.
