French library fiasco

[PROF ROBERT SCHNARE <SCHNARER@xxxxxxxxx>]

Colleagues:  I thought the following report on the new French National Library might interest you.   Bob

>>> Eric Fenster <efenster@xxxxxxx> 11/05/98 05:22pm >>>
Whatever its names--French National Library (BNF), Very Big Library
(TGB), François Mitterrand Library, Tolbiac--and guises (general
public, research, depository, virtual), the new French library was
VDOA (very dead on arrival).

The staff members have been on strike or supporting the strike for
more than two weeks (a lifetime compared to typical French labor
disputes), ever since shortly after the dysfunctional opening of the
research floor.

News reports have often been less than clear, if only because the
issues are so many and complex, entangling working conditions and the
inability to serve readers. The library administration has obfuscated,
trying to pretend there are just a few computer glitches that will
shortly be resolved, but observers with a more byzantine bent suspect
the management is only all too happy about the strike because shutting
down the library postpones discovery of the extent of the $1.5 billion
failure.

A design that could most politely be called utterly stupid has now
clashed with and destroyed function. A simple glance at the building
reveals much of the story: four 18-storey towers, about 800 feet apart,
at the corners of a rectangle. Getting from one to the other can mean
traveling as many as 36 floors down and up on a limited number of
elevators that don't always work plus an endless trek. (Talk about
unifying knowledge! CP Snow would be mortified.)

Facing these obstacles assumes can get into the building in the first
place, and a description of that process serves as a caricature of the
whole enterprise. The stairs that must be climbed first are as wide as
the whole building complex, but in wet weather only a fraction of the
access is somewhat safe. The wood chosen by the very pompous, self-
satisfied architect, Dominique Perrault, gets so slippery that early
visitors had to hang onto the occasional railing (in keeping with the
architect's penchant for austerity, the bannisters are made of steel and
are freezing to the touch) to avoid joining the list of injured; now there
are some narrow paths where a nearly invisible skid-resistant covering
has been added. Once at the top (and, by the way, wheelchairs have to
roll in the street along with the cars to find a ramp because no access
has been cut into the high curb), there is the giant space of the
esplanade to negotiate, a marvelous experience when there is wind and
rain. There are no directional signs to the target, an invisible down
ramp. Yes, having climbed the stairs, one has to descend again to reach
the entrance. Entering, at least, is easy; there are no doors. The building
is completely open to the elements and cold wind, rain and snow
follow readers into the main hall.

During the hike, there is time to admire the glass towers. These were
going to be transparent, part of Perrault's theory that the whole library
should be about a void, something parallel to his architectural brain, but
as the whole world now knows, after being reminded that this would
bake the books stored there he added protective wood panels. These
are about a meter wide, floor to ceiling, and each mounted on a central
pivot to let in or shut off light. I counted about 8,000 altogether, so
because of their rotation on the pivot this design flaw correction
wastes at least 8,000 square meters of space (roughly 84,500 square
feet) of floor space.

Inside, the anti-information mission of the library continues.
Directional signs have been deliberately camouflaged in various ways.
Gray on gray is one. Putting them out of sight (in particular for toilets)
is another.

These examples are just an introduction to a longer list of follies:
hazardous placement of elevator motors, a ventilation system with
inadequate pipes and that cooks and freezes people, a choice of
linoleum for basement floors that is quickly gouged into ruts by book
carts, water from the Seine River constantly seeping into and flooding
the building (by design of the architect), insufficient space for staff
and books, outlandish costs (about $900 for each reader's chair!).
Perrault's ego hangs over all of this, and he has divided his time
between self-praise and forbidding staff from defacing their (his)
offices with so much as a photo of their children.

Not surprising, this mammoth project was implemented without
troubling to consult librarians, throwing a wrench into everything from
the acquisition, to the receipt, to the distribution of books.  To begin
with, the four towers represent the division of the library by themes, an
organizational choice at the root of many of the problems. There are
inevitable contradictions when the French library's insistence on a
thematic structure is imposed on an acquisitions process involving the
countries of the world with their different languages and publishing and
purchasing methods. At best, it is inefficient; at worst, there will be
major gaps in collections.

When the planning errors resulted in too few books having been
purchased and received for the opening of the public part of the library,
the solution was to remove the expensive and extremely heavy
bookcases so as to salvage administrative pride by concentrating the
collection to make it look substantial. When more books arrived, the
massive furniture all had to be moved back and reinstalled.

Clearly, zero thought was given to the human beings who would have to
work in the stacks. No windows, no place to rest, no place to put one's
affairs, insufficient light (the lights go on and off automatically, so one
has to bob in front of the detectors to keep them on), immense
distances to walk daily because of the dispersal of the books too large
to fit in the automatic carrousels, minuscule lunch breaks because of
the long round trip to the cafeteria. During work these employees are
confronted with sliding bookcases that jam but can't be moved
manually and with the risk of being hit by the moving book carrousels
when they derail. All this for often less than the minimum wage and the
"understanding" of the administrators who content themselves with
explaining that now it's too late to bring the towers closer together or
to bring light into hell. In other words, it's forever.

This is the context in which the so-called computer "bugs" are just
another detail, albeit the debilitating one. Ill-conceived (absence of
multi-criteria searches, for example), incomplete, untested, constantly
crashing and foisted on a staff without sufficient training, nothing
seems to work except the PR machine that insists the promised radiant
future is just a few weeks away. The number of books a researcher is
allowed to request has been reduced many-fold below what was
promised because the books take forever to arrive, if they do at all, and
frequently researchers' library cards falsely register books they have
never seen, blocking them from leaving the library until the guards can
remove the suspicion of theft and use a special pass to release them.
So far, this automated tribute to grandeur is short-handed with twice
the staff of the old library, yet can't provide books.

In some reading rooms of the public [non-research] section, it's a
struggle to even get at the catalog because the same computers are
used for both that purpose and for Internet access. France being very
backward in that regard, thanks in large part to the telephone company's
policies and pricing, the library is an attraction for people who'd like to
go on line and can't do it at home. Once a surfer gets hold of a
computer, catalog searchers are shut out.

For these caprices, the readers are charged admission, because a
decision was made to break with the tradition of free access to the
public, the public's, library--for which, in this case, they have already
paid four times the initial cost estimate in taxes. (The question of
whose pockets may have been lined in this highly political and chummy
project hasn't even been raised yet.)

Not to risk a reputation of being user friendly, the administration
adopted a policy of charging a deliberately dissuasive 2-3 times what
commercial shops do for photocopies, and when somebody needs a
break from the calvary of trying to get books, he will find similar
overpricing in the cafeteria. The same spirit probably explains why the
administration has forbidden the library staff from participating on
Internet newsgroups that discuss library issues!

To restore some of the disorder, find the books the system is losing
and have time for proper training, the staff want to close to the public
on Mondays instead of being open seven days per week. The
administration, having to make a pretense of comprehension, has
agreed... but just for three months. The strike continues.

I emerged onto the esplanade from my visit, thankful that it was not
raining. There were still no signs to say where the streets were, or the
metro stations, but I knew that if I wandered long enough in Perrault's
empty space, I'd eventually find my way home.

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Eric Fenster efenster@xxxxxxx
Moscow Study Trips
08 May-07 June 1999
19 June-12/19 July or 26 June-19 July 1999
Anecdotal accounts from 1992-1996, FAQs, sample daily schedule and photos:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/efenster