[213] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
FYI France: the B.de France at Berkeley -- part 4 of 4
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jack Kessler)
Fri May 8 09:50:06 1992
Date: Fri, 8 May 1992 08:35:13 CDT
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L%UHUPVM1.BITNET@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU>
From: Jack Kessler <kessler%well.sf.ca.us@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU>
To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.BITNET>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie treated us to a virtuoso performance in the
fine art of being a French intellectual, on the final day of the
conference. Professor Le Roy Ladurie came to the conference wearing
several different hats. As one of the world's most well-known
historians, he commanded the attention of all the academics in our
largely-academic audience. As Administrateur of the Bibliothe`que
Nationale, he occupied a stratospheric position in the world of the
librarians in attendance. As a key, some might say crucial, figure in
the entire Bibliothe`que de France project and its controversies -- he
might have taken an aloof, "back-seat" stance and instead has been
"historien-engage'" -- Le Roy Ladurie had earned the respect of the
non-academic, non-librarian, in-fighters present. Adulation is the
price of fame, but it does not seem to have turned his head or dimmed
his wit. He did not disappoint any of us.
The title of the talk, "La Vie Quotidienne..." -- "Daily Life..." --
of an Administrateur of the BN, itself was a gentle play on words, and
characterized the gentle, tongue-in-cheek, character of Le Roy
Ladurie's entire presentation. The reference was to his fascination --
and that of the "school" of history which he represents (he made a
charming reference to "my master, Braudel") -- with the commonplace
features of daily life, as containing evidence for an historian as
valuable as any act of kings or popes or parliaments. As is his
practice in his writing, then, Le Roy Ladurie built his talk around
little stories, vignettes, homilies drawn from daily life, in this case
his. First came the story of his reaction when he was chosen for the
position: he fled -- first to hesitation, then to indecision, then to
not answering telephone calls, and finally to England. It was only in
England, on the twenty-first telephone call, he told us -- by then
secure in the knowledge that he no longer could escape, and also in the
satisfaction of having upset a number of important French politicians
-- that he accepted. His reasons for avoiding the job were the usual,
he said -- distraction from his own work, commitment to a human tangle
-- but apparently there is a stoic side to Le Roy Ladurie.
The mission, he told us, was that of "giving the impression that
someone is piloting the aircraft". His somewhat unique situation,
however, was that in this case he believed he was the first
Administrateur to have been a mere reader before -- the first pilot to
have been a passenger before becoming pilot. This gave him special
insight, and ideas for fulfilling his mission. He remembered having
been an impatient student-reader, standing in the Paris rain at 15
minutes past the opening hour, waiting for the BN doors to open: so now
he arrives before the appointed hour himself and sees that the doors
are open -- "now the first and last reader each day," he told us, "is
the Administrateur." Then too, he said, there was the problem of "en
panne": the notice, posted perpetually on all BN public telephones and
copiers, advising readers that the devices were out of order -- a
particular inconvenience, he added, for a young reader with a wife and
sick baby at home. Now, the Administrateur gives a franc from his own
pocket to a BN employee each morning, to be returned with the assurance
that all said devices are in good working order.
Le Roy Ladurie and his audience had fun with his characterizations of
relations between the BN and its "sometimes very demanding" US
readers. There were phrases like "semi-permanent insurrection", and
"lunatic fringe": never quite clearly aimed at either the Americans or
the French. No, he protested, the librarians are not the "Gestapo of
the BN", as some Americans apparently feel.
For both Americans and the rest of the BN reader-world, he said, "the
affair of the letters" had now been closed: on a given day, due to
staffing budget problems, a particular classification number category
used always to be posted as "unavailable" for that day. No longer, he
assured us. This has been resolved, as have the thorny questions of
launching into automation. "We French have been called dinosaurs," said
Le Roy Ladurie, "but the dinosaur is a very sympathetic animal, and at
least now we will become electronic dinosaurs."
Perhaps the greatest insight offered in this rambling, brilliant talk,
though, was contained in the little note Le Roy Ladurie offered about
his own upbringing. That took place, he said, in a small French town,
and his own happiest memories are of the life of that little town, in
which the full range of human existence -- the loves, the hates, the
bitterness, the jealousy, the failures, the achievements -- could be
found played out in the daily life of the town's cafe's. The
Bibliothe`que Nationale, said Le Roy Ladurie, is very like the little
town of his childhood: a human community, containing all that same
complete range of human emotion and experience. In "administering" it,
he said, one never attacks, as attacks always come back to haunt the
attacker -- administration at the BN as in the village is the practice
of the art of "persuasion". Le Roy Ladurie's talk was a gentle,
amusing, ultimately-profound presentation by a master of the medium.
Jacqueline Sanson, the second of the day's speakers, then proceeded to
tell us of what the BN staff has been "persuaded". It is a formidable
task. They are undertaking no less than an entire re-classification of
one of the world's largest library collections. Mme. Sanson does not
describe it as such. But Cle'ment's 23-letter classification system of
1688 basically is being squeezed down into the four basic departments
of the new B.de France. (The coincidence that the new building contains
four towers prompted murmurs of "architectural determinism" among the
more cynically-minded of the audience. One does wonder, though, whether
"alphabetic determinism" is that much better.)
The two governing principles of the transfer to the new site, Sanson
bravely asserted, are, 1) that the old Cle'ment codes will be
preserved, and, 2) that frequency will determine location. We knew
already that the less-used books would be up in the towers. But the
old classification codes contain 23 letters: A-E for Religion, F for
Law, G, H, and J-P for History, R for "Philosophy, Physics and
Chemistry", V for "Arts and Sciences" and X, Y and Z for "Literature
and Miscellaneous". One might write an intellectual history of France
just by tracing the development of those codes. Now such a history
might have to be re-written: "D1" now will be "History, Philosophy,
Human and Social Sciences"; "D2", "Political Science, Economics, Law";
"D3", "Science and Technology"; and "D4", "Arts and Letters":
Procrustes would have a hard time fitting Cle'ment's classifications
into that. The old books will keep their old Cle'ment codes, new books
will be assigned new "D1-2-3-4" codes, and elaborate charts and road
maps have been drawn up to show how it all will work well together. One
hopes that they won't have open stacks.
Mme. Sanson proudly described the great pains that are being taken to
preserve the rare and valuable book "Reserve", to ensure that books and
periodicals may be obtained from the same building, and to provide
adequate paging from one B.de France "section" to another. She is
convinced that it all will work, and that in fact it will be an
improvement. Not so convincing was her assurance that although the
transfer process will take two years, no particular book will be
unavailable to a reader for any longer than two weeks -- that will be
quite an achievement in logistics.
Professor Roger Chartier then turned our attention once more to
history, laboring, through a very bad cold, to convince us that the
dream of a "library without walls" -- a "universal library" -- has an
ancient and very respectable pedigree. The modern miracle, he said, is
that whereas earlier dreams had been of universal bibliography -- vast
lists of texts -- now the computer has brought within reach Borges'
dream: a universal library of the texts themselves -- of all the books
ever written, and of all the books ever to be written. "Print ruined
the dream of universal bibliography," Chartier asserted, by forcing us
to make choices and selections of the type which Naude' and classifiers
and librarians since have had to make. Compilations and extracts,
rather than universal knowledge, became the rule. The electronic
"library without walls", however, will be one which not only "holds"
all texts, but which also allows them to be manipulated directly by the
users -- the lessons of real user access, of the detachment of text
from that which used to "contain" it, and of the integration of the old
containers and forms into "multimedia", are being learned now - - and
the old metaphor of the world as a book is becoming a world on a screen
and, as such, is changing our perception of the world.
The question by now in the audience's mind, however, after three days
of conference, was, "who is going to do it?" All very well for the
competence of the technical wizards, the brilliance of the conceptual
thinkers, and the experience and dedication of supporters and staff on
all sides and at all levels. Still, who would be -- where was the
person who would be -- the prime mover, who would lead the charges,
fight the fights, and get the war won in getting all of this done?
We met him. He was the last speaker. His name is Dominique Jamet, he is
"President of the Administrative Council" of the B.de France, and he
conveys the impression of being someone who can accomplish anything
which he sets out to do. He is a heavily-built, athletic, and buoyant
man, direct and aggressive, the type with whom you wouldn't want to
arm-wrestle, much less fight a down-and-dirty political battle: a bad
man to have against your cause, and a good -- perhaps indispensable --
man for the B.de France's side.
Jamet opened by saying, in good, assertive, English, that he was
surprised -- almost disappointed -- at the lack of acrimony in the
conference proceedings: the library had not been discussed so
peacefully elsewhere, he said, certainly not at home in Paris. It is a
big project, but it is not a megalomaniac fantasy, he asserted: "it is
a clear answer to the effective needs of this society." He reassured us
that the B.de France would have, "one foot in the past, one foot in the
future," recognizing its dual role in both preserving old information
and communicating new. But it will be built, he said, and it will be
successful. He closed with a paraphrase from, he thought, Lenin, who
said that revolution was the soviets plus electric power: the
Bibliothe`que de France, Jamet asserted, will be the Bibliothe`que
Nationale PLUS computers PLUS the latest techniques of communication.
Those of us who had been through the full three days remembered
architect Perrault's proud photos of the site excavation and
announcement of the foundations being laid, and nodded. The French will
have their library.
The conference attracted 300 attendees the first day, and between 200
and 250 on each of the following two days. It was an immense success.
The microphones didn't work the first day, both guests and audience
survived the inevitable translation problems only through the
near-miraculous personal efforts of conference organizer Professor
Howard Bloch (at one point aided very ably by Professor Susanna
Barrows), and there never was enough time for questions. One would
have thought contentious Berkeley would have brought to contentious
Paris precisely the type of knock-down-and-drag-out contention which
Dominique Jamet, at any rate, relishes and appears to have expected.
Still, all sides learned very much, and very much was covered. Both the
French and the Americans in the audience learned of the existence of
other networked information worlds than their own, and in each case
their own undertook a salutary shrinkage as a consequence. Would it be
too much to ask -- of Professors Bloch and Hesse, and of other
like-minded and similarly-energetic individuals -- for a continuation
of such efforts to look at networked information worlds and libraries
outside of the US? There may be some interesting things out there.
Jack Kessler
kessler@well.sf.ca.us
