Municipal Libraries of the City Paris

Paris has a population of approximately 2.1 million, 14.4% of whom are foreign born. In the past most foreign-born residents came from former French colonies or protectorates that are now overseas department of France and they have French citizenship. In recent years immigrants have come from many other countries as well. There is wide economic disparity between the native and foreign populations. The city’s unemployment rate is 12%. Only 742,000 of the 1,815,000 people who work also live in the city. In the 20e arrondissement, the unemployment rate is 17%; and one-third of the unemployed are 25 years old or younger.
Paris has not had a central library since the central library was destroyed in a fire at the Hotel de Ville (city hall) in 1871. The library administration is housed in offices at 16 rue des Blancs Manteaux 4e (Street of the White Coats). Paris has 59 community libraries, 10 special libraries and 735,000 library card holders. These libraries house 44 million books and 81,000 DVDs and videotapes. They get nine million visitors a year.
The special libraries are Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris (City of Paris Historical Library), Bibliothèque Administrative de la Ville de Paris (City of Paris Administrative Library); Bibliothèque Forney (Forney Library [plastic, graphic and decorative arts]); Bibliothèque Musicale de Paris (Paris Music Library); Bibliothèque du Cinéma (City of Paris Cinema Library); Bibliothèque des Litératures Policières (City of Paris Detective Story Library); Centre de Documentation sur les Métiers du Livre, Bibliothèque Buffon (Buffon Library of Library Science); Fonds Historique & Documentation sur la Litterature Jeuness, Biliotheque l’Jeure Joyeuse (Children’s Literature Library); Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand (Women and Feminism Library); Bibliothèque du Tourisme & des Voyages, Bibliothèque Trocadéro (Trocadero Library of Tourism & Travel).
Competition with book and video stores is of much greater concern to French libraries than to libraries in the United States. According to French law, citizens can show the DVDs they buy only in their own homes, and they cannot lend them to friends. (As you would expect, this law is widely ignored.) Libraries can buy DVDs only after they have been available in video stores for nine to 12 months. And even then, libraries pay more for them because they also have to buy lending rights. The cost of these lending rights varies. For Disney movies, for example, they are especially high.
In an earlier posts I reported on my visit to the Bibliothèque Couronnes community library. I spent the day on Tuesday, October 27, with Catherine Auzoux, Coordinatrice du Réseau (network coordinator), who brought me to Bibliothèque Picpuc, one of the most recently renovated community libraries, and to the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris.

Mediathèque Picpuc
Libraries in France are sometimes called mediathèque to indicate that they offer multimedia materials, not just books. The Mediathèque Picpuc is a Paris municipal library that reopened in January 2009 after extensive renovations, including the installation of RFID technology. It is housed on six floors of a social housing building owned by the city. In addition to books, its collection includes 20,000 CDs and 9,000 music scores. The library also has an extensive DVD collection, including many popular American TV series.

One of the busiest municipal library in Paris, it circulated 600,000 items last year. Its music collection draws patrons from a wider area than its print collection because not all Paris municipal libraries have music collections and the Picpuc collection is one of the most extensive.
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The library is starkly modern, but welcoming. Its uncluttered spaces encourage visitors to go about their library business without distraction. The monochromatic color scheme of black, gray and white is accented with orange, but only selectively, and mostly in the children’s room.

Cyrille Fierobe, library manager, was able to make many of the color, surfaces and furnishings decisions, which included the purchase of two orange chairs with Keith Haring designs for the children’s room. Catherine Auzoux said that with budget cuts managers of other libraries slated for renovation probably won’t be given so much leeway.

Cyrille acknowledged that a six-story space with only one elevator is not ideal for a library, but explained that the library had to make the best of the space the city made available. He conceded that the fourth floor, which would be the fifth floor in an American building is not the best floor for a children’s room, but it was chosen because it is the best of the public floors because it has the most light. On Saturdays, which are the busiest days, customers often have to wait for the elevator.



The ground floor houses only the circulation desk, newspapers and magazines and a seating area. The rest of the space is left open and used for program. Glass doors from the ground floor lead to an outside area with comfortable seating that patrons can use in good weather. Above the ground floor, in addition to the children’s room, are an adult fiction floor, an adult nonfiction floor, a young adult floor and an office floor. The adult, young adult and children’s areas of the library have computers for public use. The library has areas where customers can plug in their laptops, and it offers wifi.

Germany has very strict laws with regard to the amount of space and the amount of natural light that must be made available for each employee. Since the office floor at Mediathèque Picpuc is flooded with natural light, I asked Catherine if France had similar laws. Not laws, she said, but recommendations.

Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris

The Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris is in le Marais (swamp) a district of Paris with many old buildings because it is one of the few districts that were not affected by Baron Houssmann’s plan to rebuild the city during the reign of Napoleon III. The Bibliothèque Historique is housed in a Hotel Particulier that dates from the 15th century. Hotels Particuliers were the medieval mansions of the aristocracy.

The Bibliothèque Historique is a reference library whose collection of 600,000 documents about the history Paris includes maps, photographs and books. The collection replaces an earlier historical collection destroyed in a fire in the Hotel de Ville (city hall) in 1871.
The library was part of the Musée de Carnavalet, the city’s history museum, until 1968 when it moved to its present location. The library computerized its catalog in 2004. It recently undertook a digitization project, and to date it has digitized 200 of its maps.

The only areas of the library open to the public are the map room and a reading room that seats 80. Anyone 18 year of age or older is eligible for a library card, which is different from the municipal library card. Since the collection (except map facsimiles) is closed, customers have to request the items they want and wait approximately 20 minutes for them to be retrieved from the stacks. The library is used mostly by journalists, students and historians.

The map room contains an collection of facsimiles of maps arranged by date. Many of the older maps offer a bird’s-eye view of the Paris looking east. During my visit, Genevieve Madore, chief librarian showed me six maps that traced the growth of Paris from medieval times to the late 19th century. In these maps you can see the facades of the city’s churches which were always built facing west.

The Bibliothèque Historique collection includes original as well as facsimiles of manuscripts by authors such as Voltaire, Georges Sand and Gustave Flaubert. The library hosts special exhibitions and is planning one on the 1910 great flood of Paris when the water level of the Seine reached 20 feet above normal drowning streets throughout the city and sending thousands of Parisians fleeing to emergency shelters.