Bibliothèque Couronnes is a medium-size Paris municipal library. It has an adult area, a children’s area and a discothèque (music library). It occupies approximately 1,000 square meters on two floors of a social housing building in the Belleville quarter. It has a staff of 21. Romain Gaillard, library manager, explained that the staff would be smaller if the branch wasn’t engaged in so much activity outside of the library with local schools and community organizations.
Bibliothèque Couronnes has a collection of 56,000 items and circulates approximately 7,500 items each month including many fiction CDs. Previously these novels were recorded on several discs, but with MP3 technology they can be recorded on one.
The Bibliothèque Couronnes manager plans to weed 10 to 15% of the collection. The Paris municipal library has no central library, but it has a warehouse where approximately 140,000 books are stored, including many books weeded from the branch libraries’ collections. If customers request these books, they are delivered to the requesting location within two days.
The library has three public access computers that customers can use for 15 minutes. It also has eight computers customers can reserve for up to 90 minutes. Self-learning or autoformation as it is called at the Bibliotheque Publique d’Information appears to be not as popular in French libraries as it is in German libraries. The Paris municipal library branches do not offer self-learning computer courses.
Books in the Paris municipal libraries are classified according to the Dewey Decimal System, but French music libraries organize their collections according to the Principes Classification de Musique, of which Musique du Monde (world music) is the largest part. Bibliothèque Couronnes has gone one step further by color coding world music from Arabic countries blue and world music from Africa orange, and arranging its music in these categories by country of origin because many of its customers are from North or sub-Saharan Africa. Library cards are free in France, but Paris public library customers must pay €40.00 a year to borrow CDs and €61.00 a year to borrow CDs and DVDs.
Only a fraction of Paris municipal libraries have DVD collections because they are considered unfair competition to private business. For the same reason public libraries in Paris get only one or two copies of best sellers and only after they books already have been in bookstores for two or three weeks.
The administration of the Paris public library prepares extensive lists of new books. On the day I visited the Bibliothèque Couronnes, staff members were reviewing the lists and deciding what books to buy. The branch’s collection includes 2,500 books in Arabic, which it buys from the Institute do Monde Arabe in Paris, the supplier currently approved by the administration. Many of these books are published in Lebanon. The library also subscribes to an Arabic newspaper for women published in London that is very popular with its customers. It had far fewer books in Arabic 10 years ago, but the administration directed it to buy more contemporary fiction. It also buys Arabic books on Vie Pratique (practical life) such as cooking, education and child rearing. The library has a large collection of books on sub-Saharan Africa as well, but these books are in French.
The children’s area was recently renovated with new paint, new furniture and new carpets. The library arranges some books by theme and others by a simplified version of Dewey. The non-fiction is arranged by age, with the books for younger children on the lower shelves and the books for older children on the higher shelves. The library also puts books and magazines together on the shelves in the subject areas.
Like the libraries in Germany, the Paris libraries open library accounts for schools and community organizations. The lending period for these organizations is six week. Children pay no fine if they return their materials late, but if they do this too many times their accounts are blocked.
Plans for the branch library include weeding many print reference resources, especially some encyclopedias because customers now get this information from the internet and replacing the books in this area with foreign language and other self-learning materials as well as job and career materials. Romain also wants to replace the furniture in the newspaper reading room and put a coffee machine in the foyer. Customers will be allowed to drink coffee in the library.
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