Monumental building of concrete, wood and glass overlooking the Seine, in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, the François-Mitterrand site, the largest of the National Library of France (BNF), is made up of four towers of eighteen floors arranged in the form of open books around an esplanade.
Everything here is gigantic.
Its collection houses more than 15 million works, making it the second in Europe behind that of the German National Library, based in Frankfurt.
But above all, its legal deposit mission is colossal!
"Since 1537, by order of François Ier, each document printed on French territory has been collected and kept at the BNF in order to constitute a reference collection", explains Tiphaine Vacqué, assistant to the legal deposit department.
Each year, 90,000 books and 200,000 periodicals (newspapers, booklets, municipal and association bulletins, etc.) are thus gleaned.
And every day, its collections are enriched.
The François-Mitterrand site with its four towers on the banks of the Seine, in the 13th arrondissement of Paris, is the largest in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF).
LP / Jean-Baptiste Quentin
Even web pages are archived
While, in two hours, students and researchers will be settling in the reading rooms with 400 linear kilometers of shelving, the postman arrives, like every day at 8 a.m., to deliver huge boxes to the basement. overflowing with envelopes and parcels containing the documents that the BNF must keep.
Charge to Guy Bourdon, storekeeper for thirty-six years, to classify the periodicals of the day.
No one escapes it.
You can find Le Parisien du jour, but also L'Echo des baskistes du gymnase du Ponthieu, or the Magazine of the Association du berger de Brie.
“We have already received magazines with sextoys, or an art magazine surrounded by barbed wire,” he laughs.
Books, photos, plans, sheet music, software and even video games are also archived.
Even the websites.
Since 2006, a selection of pages ending in “.
fr ”is kept, or 3.1 billion web links for the year 2019 alone!
Advertising brochures, youth or porn magazines… Who knows what the research will be in two hundred years?
Once registered and classified, the documents are sent to the storage areas, accessible only to BNF agents.
Located in the eleven upper floors of the four towers, these “stores” cover 57,000 m2, the equivalent of eight football fields.
In these rooms without windows - the sun would risk damaging the documents - silence reigns.
A certain freshness too: the thermometer constantly displays 18 ° C to preserve the archives.
The newspapers are kept at the BNF in a “store” reserved for the press.
Roberta valerio
The volume collected is such that the press from the Third to the Fifth Republic alone mobilizes an entire tower!
The least requested archives are kept in other sites, such as that of Bussy-Saint-Georges, in Seine-et-Marne.
But soon we will have to find space again.
Inaugurated in 1995 by President François Mitterrand when the historic site, located rue Richelieu, in the 2nd arrondissement of Paris, was packed, the site, which preserves 49 million documents, is already overflowing.
Interventions on rare books are recorded
Return to the basement where we sort, classify, distribute.
The team dedicated to the legal deposit of books takes care of registering the 400 books sent today by La Poste.
Whatever the format and theme, printers are required to send a copy to the BNF.
Placed on blue trolleys, they are then dispatched within the different departments: languages, literature, religion, history and geography ...
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In her fifth-floor office, with a breathtaking view of the Seine, Sophie Pitet, cataloger in the human sciences department, registers them one by one in a software that lists all the collections received by legal deposit, before archiving them at the 14th floor.
When books are requested by readers, storekeepers slip them into one of the blue buckets of the Automatic Document Transport System (TAD).
This network runs through the library on seven kilometers of rails hanging from the ceiling, bringing them directly into the reading room.
A unique system in the world, which saves storekeepers countless back and forth trips.
The archives can be consulted on site.
They circulate between floors thanks to an ingenious system of automated trolleys.
Roberta valerio
Certain writings constitute a separate category: rare books.
Nearly 9,000 invaluable works, such as the first editions of major texts by Rabelais or Montaigne, or even the original plates of “Asterix le Gaulois” dating from 1960, are sheltered in a bunker on the ground floor. of garden.
To access this treasure room, you have to go through several armored doors and disarm surveillance systems.
"The most exceptional of them is a Latin bible by Gutenberg, one of the first books printed in Europe, in an extraordinary state of preservation", reveals with pride Bérénice Stoll, curator.
These documents are regularly entrusted to a team of restorers and bookbinders.
Eric Bazin, one of these “surgeons of books”, has just completed meticulous work on a collection of Gregorian chants from the beginning of the 16th century.
After 160 hours of work, here are the parchments and the binding restored.
He took care to write down his interventions in detail.
"Future generations must have a record of everything that has been done", explains the specialist.
The most surprising thing is to discover that the BNF also keeps 6,000 theater, dance and music hall costumes, nearly 1,500 puppets, 500 masks, posters, models… “We are trying to preserve the memory of all the expressions of performing arts, suggests Joël Huthwohl, director of the Performing Arts Department.
One of our most beautiful pieces is a black fetish dress by Edith Piaf, given by her secretary Danielle Bonel ”, he announces, taking it out with emotion from its cover.
One more treasure preserved for future generations in this sanctuary.
