This quarterly column of news, views and snippets from the international literature of books, libraries, and information, appeared in the December 2023 issue of LIASA-in-Touch, the newsletter of the Library and Information Association of South Africa.

It all happened in Paris

Rugby players and their fans were not the only important visitors to Paris recently. In September, King Charles III and Queen Camilla were in Paris on a state visit to renew ties with Britain’s ancient adversary and Twentieth Century ally. On the second day of the visit, Queen Camilla and French First Lady, Mme Brigitte Macron, launched a new UK-France literary prize. The Prix Entente Littéraire (Entente Literary Prize) is for young adult fiction and it is hoped that it will promote the translation of such fiction across the English Channel (Casassus 2023). Its name recalls the Entente Cordiale of 1904, which ended a millennium of rivalry and conflict between the two countries (“Entente Cordiale” 2023). Symbolism and optics! That’s part and parcel of diplomacy. To add French prestige to the occasion, the launch took place in the magnificently restored seventeenth century building of the Bibliothèque nationale on the rue Richelieu in the heart of Paris. (It is a peculiarity of French spelling that in the names of corporate bodies, only the initial words and proper names are spelled with capital letters.)

Cultural prestige is important in France. Each French president wants  his legacy to be remembered. In 1988 President Mitterand (in office 1981-1995) announced a project to build a very large and modern national library on the left bank of the Seine, in what was then the run-down neighbourhood of Tolbiac. I visited the site several times while the building was under construction (plagued by delays and cost overruns), and afterwards. It is an enormous and striking new landmark and worth visiting, but impractical and expensive to run. In library architecture it is not easy to marry prestige and efficiency.

La Bibliothèque François-Mitterand, Tolbiac, Paris.  Image

After most of the national library collections and functions had been moved to Tolbiac, it was the turn of the old national library building to be restored (Bergdoll 2017). The renovated library has reading rooms for special collections (including maps and plans, prints, photographs, manuscripts, coins, medals, and manuscripts), and a book museum. The museum has been installed in the splendid baroque Galerie Mazarin, which dates from 1646 (Sciolino 2022). That is where Queen Camilla and Mme Macron launched the new prize.

Galerie Mazarin, Bibliothèque nationale de France, rue Richelieu, Paris.  Image (c) Guillaume Murat

It is not unusual to see national libraries featuring as venues for glittering diplomatic events.  I wonder, to what extent is our (South African) Department of International Relations (DIRCO), utilising the impressive spaces of our national library to host prestigious diplomatic events?

But across the Channel…

For a radically different library building, let’s cross the English Channel and travel north to the village of Boston Spa, in West Yorkshire. Older readers will remember this as the home of the British Library Lending Division (BLLD), now the British Library Document Supply Service. None of the buildings located on this 44 acre (18 hectare) site look much like a library, but resemble warehouses in an  industrial park. From this site, the British Library continues to provide document delivery services in the UK, and houses ever-growing British Library collections amounting to around 87.5 million items, including 296,000 international journal titles (“British Library” 2023).

Newspaper Storage Library of the British Library Document Supply Centre, Boston Spa, Yorkshire (Image: Cheryl Shorter, DCMS Libraries)

Where to put it all? The rapidly growing collection poses a massive challenge, discussed in a fascinating article by Tom Airey (2022).  The latest addition to the site is the Newspaper Storage Library, which can accommodate 60 million issues of local, regional and national UK newspapers from the last three centuries. A robotic retrieval system collects requested newspaper issues.

Automated retrieval system installed in the British Library’s Newspaper Storage Building at Boston Spa, Yorkshire (Image: Cheryl Shorter, DCMS Libraries)

More national library snippets: from hi-tech…

For most of the items in this column I used items from the September 2023 issue of newsletter of IFLA’s Section of National Libraries, National libraries news, Which should be available here in the first quarter of 2014.  This  issue included a news item from the National Library of Finland, on a subject indexing tool developed there, called Annif. Annif uses artificial intelligence, a combination of natural language processing and machine learning tools, to assist in subject indexing and classification. It is multilingual and can be used with any indexing vocabulary. One can try it out online on the Annif website. A service for automated subject index called Finto AI, which is based on Annif, is described in an English-language article in the online Italian journal JLIS.it (Suominen, Inkinen, and Lehtinen 2022).

…to tactile children’s books

In September this year I spent a week at IFLA Headquarters in The Hague, doing research in IFLA’s archives. The IFLA offices are in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), the National Library of the Netherlands. On my way from the foyer to IFLA’s offices, I used to pass the entrance of the Literature Museum, which has a children’s book museum. It was difficult to miss, because children’s voices echoed through the foyer, and there were always toddlers and preschool kids with parents or guardians coming and going.

The children’s book museum offers a wide range of educational programmes for primary and secondary school pupils and other users (“Literatuurmuseum” n.d.). The KB has an enormous collection of Dutch books and comics, including many children’s classics. There are also more recent formats, such as the tactile versions of children’s picture books that are produced by the PrentenboekenPlus Foundation. National libraries news featured one example, Lodewijk I, Koning der schapen (Louis the First, King of the Sheep) a Dutch translation of a French picture book by Olivier Tallec.

Exhibition of a tactile version of a children’s picture book by Olivier Tallec, exhibited in the Literature Museum of the KB, National Library of the Netherlands (Image, KB)

It is about a Louis, just an ordinary sheep, until the wind blows him a crown. He puts it on his head and becomes King Louis I. This picture book has been adapted for children with disabilities and comes as a package containing the original book, a version with tactile lines and Braille, a cuddly toy sheep, and instructions for the person reading the book aloud to children. It is featured on the KB’s web page for remarkable items from its collections, where there is a video with English subtitles and background information about how such special tactile editions of children’s picture books are created (KB Nationale Bibliotheek n.d.).

References

Airey, Tom. 2022. “Building a Bigger Home for the British Library Collection.” BBC News, March 12, 2022, sec. Leeds & West Yorkshire. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-leeds-60668721.

Bergdoll, Barry. 2017. “Restoration and Renovation of Henri Labrouste’s Bibliothèque Nationale Richelieu | 2017-08-01 | Architectural Record.” Architectural Record. August 1, 2017. https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/12868-restoration-and-renovation-of-henri-labroustes-bibliotheque-nationale-richelieu.

“British Library.” 2023. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=British_Library&oldid=1190554905.

Casassus, Barbara. 2023. “Queen Camilla and Brigitte Macron Launch Anglo-French Book Prize.” The Bookseller. September 22, 2023. https://www.thebookseller.com/news/queen-camilla-and-brigitte-macron-launch-anglo-french-book-prize.

“Entente Cordiale.” 2023. In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Entente_Cordiale&oldid=1181205642.

KB Nationale Bibliotheek. n.d. “Lodewijk I in the PrentenboekenPlus Series.” KB Nationale Bibliotheek. Accessed December 19, 2023. https://www.kb.nl/en/ontdekken-bewonderen/opmerkelijke-objecten/lodewijk-i-de-serie-prentenboekenplus.

“Literatuurmuseum.” n.d. The Memory. Accessed December 19, 2023. https://geheugen.delpher.nl/en/geheugen/pages/instelling/Letterkundig+Museum.

Sciolino, Elaine. 2022. “A Vault Holding Long-Hidden French Treasures Swings Open Its Doors.” The New York Times, October 14, 2022, sec. Arts. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/14/arts/design/french-national-library-reopens.html.

Suominen, Osma, Juho Inkinen, and Mona Lehtinen. 2022. “Annif and Finto AI: Developing and Implementing Automated Subject Indexing.” JLIS.It 13 (1): 265–82. https://doi.org/10.4403/jlis.it-12740.