Des puces, des livres et des hommes... La numérisation des imprimés à la Bibliothèque nationale de France

Of Microchips, Books… and Men. The Digitization of Printed Material in the French National Library
The ruling princes of France have often dreamed up grandiose projects for her: witness the Louvre, Versailles and innumerable other monuments which constitute the exceptional patrimony of this country. At the turning of the 20th century, this same impulse built the Eiffel Tower and then launched, with unequal success, vast aeronautical, aerospatial and nuclear ventures. When a new civilization was announced, marked by the rise of information and communication technologies, we could do no less than offer to everyone all the knowledge accumulated during these centuries of light. (Official plan be damned ; the French Revolution obliges us!).
And so was born the project of building “the largest and most modern library in the world”, which, thanks to digitization and teletransmission, could be consulted from every household; the venerable “Bibliothèque nationale” will then become the overseer of an intelligentsia infatuated with letters and high technology.
Julie Bouchard explains how, regardless of any thinking about, needs and purpose, the project of creating a “virtual library” was born, which, under the pretext of being exhaustive, coherent and universally accessible, might be open in 1998 for the benefit of a few researchers who are well trained in reading “intelligent terminals”. She describes how, motivated by boundless ambition, technical choices were made on the digitization of documents, teletransmission and terminals which, at the end of day, compromise the patrimonial function of the BN and its accessibility.
This analysis, alas, shows all too clearly that modernity has meant escape into a future thought up exclusively by technicians for the glory of His Supreme Majesty: King Science.