College and Research Libraries


that affects us all, from the small public 
library to the federal government. 

Compared with this vexing problem, 
the question of censorship or suppres-
sion of information appears more ame-
nable to compromise, although it can be 
difficult in practice to balance conflict-
ing political and social "goods." fiE's 
writers come down on the liberal side of 
most of these issues. Contributors com-
fortably call for the publication of aNa-
tive American history of Little Big Hom, 
oppose the Wilson Library Bulletin's firing 
of 'Will Manley, and attack Pat Robertson, 
Dan Quayle, left-wing censors, and state 
terrorism around the world. They have 
not yet dealt with the thornier issues of 
pornography and hate speech. 

Ethical discussions of computerized 
information often concern the integrity, 
privacy, and security of data encoded in 
this most fluid of formats. The computer 
can make information more widely acces-
sible, as Senator Patrick Leahy proudly 
explains in a solicited piece. But it also 
makes information difficult to control: 
subject to damage, mishandling, hidden 
surveillance, and unauthorized reproduc-
tion and revision. Articles on this subject, 
such as Carol Tenopir's sensible ''Ethics 
for Online Educators," tend to be recipes 
for the prevention of abuse rather than 
probings of ethical dilemmas. 

Articles on ethical questions in acade-
mia cannot be said to share any particu-
lar problem or approach. Perhaps the 
theme of dishonesty would cover pla-
giarism, hackers, and book theft. Con-
flict of interest is addressed in a study of 
faculty textbook selection and in Adam 
Drozdek's warning about corporate and 
military sponsorship of university re-
search ("Pecunia Non Olet"). Again, the 
underlying philosophical question is the 
possible danger to the public good of an 
instrumental approach to the generation 
and dissemination of information. 

This theme of the public trust emerges 
once again in Fred Whitehead's column 
decrying the sale of the rare book collec-
tion of the Kansas City Public Library. 
Whitehead delivers an unusual argu-
ment against the conventional wisdom 
that librarians should manage their col-

Book Reviews 269 

lections without outside interference 
from the public. 

An editorial in the Spring 1993 issue 
of JIE ends with this plea: "The point of 
all these warnings is to alert us to the 
dangers inherent in an increasingly tech-
nological society. Be wary! Individual 
freedoms require vigilance." The lesson 
contained within the journal's own 
pages is, I think, somewhat different. It 
points to the need for thoughtful explo-
ration of the place of information (and of 
librarians) in the good ("ethical") life, 
both at the individual and the sociallev-
els.-Jean Alexander, Northwestern Uni-
versity, Evanston, Illinois. 

Gattegno, Jean. lA Bibliotheque de France a 
mi-parcours: de Ia TGB a Ia BN bis? Paris: 
Editions du Cercle de la Librairie, 
1992. 259p. FF 125 (ISBN 27654-0512-3). 
"J' en ai 1' ambition et je le ferai": This 

is my ambition, and I will do it. This 
statement typifies the July 14, 1988, let-
ter of Fran<;ois Mitterand to his prime 
minister, announcing, in his visionary 
manner, a new project in the series of 
"grands travaux" that includes the 
Grand Louvre and the Opera de la Bas-
tille. Mitterand's letter created the tex-
tual blueprint for what was to become 
the Bibliotheque de France (BdF), also 
known as the Ires Grande Bibliotheque 
(TGB). Its few paragraphs contain a 
philosophical conception of a library 
that had yet to become a shared vision. 
This new library, according to Mitter-
and, would be a "very large library of a 
completely new type .... [I]t will cover 
all fields of knowledge, will be open to 
all, and will use the latest technical 
innovations to transmit information." 
The contrast with the venerated but tra- . 
ditional Bibliotheque Nationale (BN) 
could not have been stated more clearly: 
the BN in its cramped site on rue de 
Richelieu has one of the richest and most 
important collections in the humanities 
but covers the other branches of knowl-
edge only from a historical perspective. 
The BN has also been dependent on the 
depot legal, and as a consequence is weak 
in foreign imprints. Furthermore, the li-
brary has restrictive access procedures 



270 College & Research Libraries 

and is extremely cautious in adopting 
technical innovations. 

Jean Gattegno traces the complicated 
history of this immense project in a book 
that does not hide the author's disap-
pointment about how a revolutionary 
idea deteriorated into a fairly common-
place extension of the BN (the "BN bis" 
of the subtitle- which translates loosely 
as BN the Second). Gattegno, who 
worked closely with the Bdf Group in a 
variety of leadership positions, is able to 
draw on his intimate knowledge of the 
project. His book covers in detail the 
prehistory of the BdF, starting with the 
Francis Beck report in 1987 evaluating 
the problematic situation at the BN, and 
continuing up to 1992, when Gattegno 
was asked to leave the project. He has 
organized his material into three major 
parts: a historique or chronology outlin-
ing very carefully and as objectively as 
possible the different reports and memo-
randa, documenting the changes in the 
ongoing project, and the reactions in the 
French and foreign press. For the unini-
tiated reader unfamiliar with the differ-
ent ministerial agencies, the reporting 
structures, and the various shades of 
French bureaucratic language, this sec-
tion might be quite tedious, but it is in 
fact a very rich historical source. In the 
second and third parts, problhnatique 
and critique et autocritique, Gattegno 
delves into issues such as the infighting 
within the bureaucracies, the turf wars 
between the BN and those creating the 
BdF, the petty personality issues, the fi-
nancial restrictions the project ulti-
mately had to accept, the mistakes made 
by the BdF team, and most importantly 
the different philosophical conceptions 
held by some of the powerful constitu-
encies involved with the presidential 
project. 

The book should be especially illumi-
nating to those on this side of the Atlan-
tic because North American librarians 
and scholars have mostly been hearing 
the voices of the critics. By now, we are 
all familiar with two hot buttons: the 
infamous break or cesure of the print col-
lection dividing pre/post 1945 imprints 
between the BN and the BdF, and the 

May1994 

conservation hazards of the four glass 
book towers. These problems, according 
to Gattegno, were recognized and re-
solved by the BdF team by transferring 
the whole print collection of the BN to 
the BdF and by redesigning the towers 
to protect the books from the impact of 
significant temperature differentiations. 
Nonetheless, the critics of the project 
used these flaws to discredit the broader 
purposes of the BdE The debate on these 
broader purposes was never really aired, 
and Gattegno tries to set the record 
straight. The book also quite pointedly 
sketches a Parisian political and intellec-
tual milieu in which media-savvy intel-
lectual mandarins, eager to protect their 
interests, can wage a very effective me-
dia offensive. Dominique Jamet, the 
president of the BdF project, was never 
accepted in this milieu because of his 
status as a mere journalist, and espe-
cially because his appointment had been 
perceived as a slight against Emmanuel 
LeRoy Ladurie, world-famous historian 
and the administrateur-general of the 
BN. Gattegno, in very reasoned terms, 
illuminates the role LeRoy Ladurie has 
played in the media campaign and his 
gutting of the more unconventional as-
pects of the BdE 

Gattegno has a substantial back-
ground in the public library sector-for 
eight years he had been, within the Min-
istry of Culture, in charge of the public 
library system in France-and he under-
stood the revolutionary nature of Mitter-
and's vision within the French library 
context. To start collecting aggressively 
in the social sciences and physical sci-
ences, and to open these research collec-
tions to all, might not seem revolutionary 
in the United States, but to some in France 
it constitutes a reenactment of the storm-
ing of the Bastille. Furthermore, the plan 
to host conferences and lecture series in 
the BdF complex would increase even 
further its nonscholarly component. Le 
Roy Lad urie referred in this context to 
"l'effet Beaubourg" that would plague 
the BdF, a reference to the street enter-
tainment outside the Centre Georges 
Pompidou, which houses the Bib-
liotheque d'lnformation (BPI), a very ac-



tive public library. The commitment of 
the BdF to collect other media, to start an 
aggressive effort to digitize texts and 
manuscripts and to serve as an informa-
tion node for the wider distribution of 
these electronic documents to public 
and university libraries within France 
and to major research libraries abroad, 
led one critic (Jacques Julliard) to ex-
claim that the "BdF would become the 
Disneyland of reading." 

In 1992 Gattegno was asked to leave 
his position, an indication that the direc-
tion of the project was about to change 
significantly after the failure of various 
attempts to compromise (e.g., estab-
lishing separate reading rooms for the 
general public and for researchers). In 
January 1994 Dominique Jamet was also 
replaced. More importantly, the BN and 
the BdF were merged into a single ad-
ministrative entity: the Bibliotheque Na-
tionale de France (BNdF). Emmanuel Le 
Roy Ladurie was appointed president 
of the Conseil Scientifique, an an-
nouncement that will not have come as 
a surprise to Gattegno. In his estimation, 
the dismantlement of a "library of a 
completely new type" to a BN bis had 
been completed.-Kurt De Belder, New 
York University, New York, New York. 

Musmann, Klaus J. Technological Innova-
tions in Libraries, 1860-1960: An An-
ecdotal History. Westport, Conn.: 
Greenwood, 1993. 245p. $55 (ISBN 0-
313-28015-0). 
Librarians assume too easily that to-

day's technological challenges and 
promises represent something new for 
libraries. We look back nostalgically to 
the stability of the library world prior to 
the 1980s (the era of bibliographic utili-
ties, online catalogs, COs, CD-ROM), or 
the 1970s (when circulation systems, on-
line searching, and videocassettes came 
into use), or the 1960s (when LPs and 
early automation were introduced). 
Klaus Musmann reminds us that techno-
logical change is not a phenomenon of 
the past thirty years: he argues that 
changes around the turn of the century 
were quite as revolutionary as anything 
in the present. He cites as examples the 

Book Reviews 271 

impact of cheap, safe artificial light; 
proper ventilation for large library 
spaces; even the standardized 75-by-125 
millimeter catalog card. Musmimn 
points out that librarians have always 
faced technical difficulties, e.g., how to 
disinfect returned books, how to man-
age newspaper collections before micro-
film or how to deal with the "library 
hand" before typewriters were wide-
spread. 

Nor is the feeling that the printed 
book is doomed anything new. In 1918 
Ho~er Croy was convinced that print 
would be replaced by motion pictures. In 
1926 Melvil Dewey had us outgrowing 
books within fifty years. In 1936 Stephen 
Gaselee "expressed some doubts whether 
the book would survive as a popular me-
dium for the diffusion of knowledge dur-
ing an age of broadcasting and television." 
In 1938 Alice Farquhar asserted that radio 
had decreased public library circulation, 
that people could not be expected to read 
books and magazines on current affairs 
when the radio offered "last minute in-
formation fascinatingly presented," and 
asked "Why read a mystery when you 
can get your hair to stand on end, just 
passively listening to 'Lights Out'?" 
Similarly, G. D. Richardson contended in 
1951 that television would entirely re-
place recreational reading. Since the 
1930s librarians have suggested that mi- · 
croform publications would or should 
replace books-and in 1935 Louis 
Hewitt Fox wrote that "the average 
reader prefers the film to the book." 

Musmann begins his book with a dis-
cussion of technological innovations, 
revealing a somewhat downbeat atti-
tude about the significance of libraries: 
surely it is an overstatement that pub-
lic libraries are no longer "an impor-
tant force in the leisure time activities 
of the public-at-large" in many cities and 
towns. Still, the book offers its own 
grounds for optimism. The second chap-
ter, "Librarians in an Age of Technologi-
cal Change," deals not with the present 
but with the period from 1887 through 
1958. If librarians survived that age 
and used technological change to im-
prove library holdings and services,