Digitisation of the new Bibliothèque Nationale de France

Throughout the world there are only a few major national libraries: the British Library in London, the National Library of Congress in Washington and the National Library of Canada. In 1995, the new Bibliothèque Nationale de France is due to be inaugurated. It aims to the world's first 21st Century national library and will offer readers and researchers 300 computer assisted reading stations, known in French as PLAO, from which digitised documents from the Bibliothèque's enormous archives can be read, annotated and compiled into in‐depth research projects on a wide variety of subjects.