Digital music fans pining for the vintage Parisian pop sounds of sex kitten Brigitte Bardot are in luck.

Universal Music Group International said today it was embarking on a digital archaeology program of sorts, unearthing and digitizing 100,000 previously deleted European recordings in order to make them available to download services like iTunes.

The first batch of 3,000 download-only, back-catalogue recordings will come from the UK, France, and Germany and will be available on major download services in February.

The previously deleted catalog includes UK artists like Marianne Faithfull, Eddie & the Hot Rods, Fairport Convention, Chris DeBurgh, and the original Nirvana, a 1970s psychedelic rock group that reunited in 1996 to cover the song "Lithium" for a compilation from the much more popular grunge rockers of the same name.

The catalog also includes European artists like Bardot, Jacques Brel, Nana Mouskouri, L'Affaire Louis Trio, Udo Lindenberg, and Eddy Mitchell.

"Over the next three to four years, we aim to reissue perhaps as many as 10,000 albums for downloading, which amounts to more than 100,000 tracks," Barney Wragg of UMGI's eLabs division said in a statement. "And this program will offer material that, in some cases, goes back to the early days of recorded music."

UMG said it has the industry's largest archive of deleted recordings. The move marks the label's attempt to take advantage of one of the biggest benefits of the digital age: the profitability of selling a relatively small number of copies of a song as long as a compact disc does not have to be manufactured and distributed.

Universal said it expects the digitization process to be an ongoing one and to involve substantial investment, particularly for the excavation and digitization of older, rare, analog material.