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At the age of 18, Ferdinand Denis (1798-1890) sailed to Brazil to work as a secretary at the French consulate in Salvador de Bahia. His stay in the tropics lasted four years and marked him deeply. He became an Americanist and dedicated the rest of his nearly 70-year-long professional life to the promotion and study of Iberian and Latin American culture from the Sainte-Geneviève Library, where he became the fourth employee around 1830. In 1841 he was promoted to the position of curator, then became director between 1865 and 1885. The library, located in the heart of the Latin Quarter in Paris, preserves a large part of Ferdinand Denis's personal archive and his library, the oldest works of which date back to the 16th century.

Although Ferdinand Denis has been well studied, most of his life, written works and cultural actions remain unknown to many researchers because his legacy has only been partially documented. Most of the collection, including original documents of immeasurable importance for Latin American studies, does not have a backup copy. This must be remedied by detailed cataloguing for the purposes of thorough digitization and subsequent online dissemination.

The Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros (IEB), at the University of São Paulo, preserves a complementary collection related to Ferdinand Denis. The association between the Sainte-Geneviève Library and the Brazilian research center will allow to develop a nucleus for the dissemination in Brazil of the Parisian virtual collection alongside that preserved by the IEB.