We present a complete description of atomic storage states which may appear in the electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT). The result shows that the spatial coherence has been included in the atomic collective operators and the atomic storage states. In some limits, a set of multimode atomic storage states has been established in correspondence with the multimode Fock states of the electromagnetic field. This gives a better understanding of the fact that, in BIT, the optical coherent information can be preserved and recovered.