Public Information Library - Centre Pompidou
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Discover the Bpi
Construction of the Bpi
Planning the project
The idea of a large public reading library right in the centre of Paris was initiated in the 1960s, at a time when the decision to move the central Paris market to Rungis liberated an enormous space in the Les Halles district. The project was approved by the Ministry of Education in 1967, and in the following year a Department "responsible for the Les Halles public library" was created in the National Library, with Jean-Pierre Seguin as its Director.
In 1969, President Georges Pompidou proposed that a Museum of Modern Art be built on the Beaubourg site. The Library was then integrated into this new project, and the idea of a multi-purpose cultural centre took shape.
During this time, Jean-Pierre Seguin undertook various missions abroad in order to develop the library project. The observations made in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Finland and Sweden provided much valuable information on issues relating to the architecture and interior design of the building, as well as concerning the organisation of the collections and services.
Developing the content
From 1970, the team of the future library was hard at work preparing its content. The first books were purchased in 1971, and major acquisitions continued to be made, reaching a total of 270,000 works in 1976.
With its aim of benefitting from new technologies from the start, the library integrated multimedia documents in different formats into its collections: images in the form of slides, films, sound documents, methods of learning languages that employed audio and video cassettes. This made it necessary to provide in the reading areas the appropriate equipment for each format in order to be able to consult the materials.
The creation of the Library catalogue was also an area of major innovation, as Jean-Pierre Seguin had dreamt since 1969 of an entirely "automated" library, with the user having the possibility to make his own searches using a computer. But this technology was not yet available, and in 1974 the Library was equipped with the German BIKAS system, which made it possible to publish printed catalogues based on computerised data.
The opening
The Pompidou Centre was officially inaugurated on 31 January 1977 in the presence of President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. It was opened to the public on 2 February.
The Library consisted of 15,000 m² of space without walls or partitions on 3 floors, linked by an escalator. In addition there was a library for children and a "current affairs" room on the ground floor: the latter aimed to provide, in a space open to everybody, a wide range of current publications and of French and foreign newspapers and news magazines.
Focus on :
Birth of the Bpi idea: inventing the media library
Consult on-line the book by Jean-Pierre Seguin, founder and first Director of the Bpi, on the Our Publications site.
Jean-Pierre Seguin:
My Years at the Bpi
The founder and first Director of the Bpi, Jean-Pierre Seguin, talks about the origin and implementation of the project.
He describes (in French) his visits to foreign libraries, the meetings, the polemics about the Library, the 26 versions of the Decree that created it, how its name was decided, the inauguration.
The opening of the Bpi: photo album
"We open the doors, they bump into us, especially me, as I try to catch the first person to enter, in order to welcome him. But he was not interested... He just accepted to tell me that his area of interest was poetry. That man's arrival indicated that at last the Bpi existed", Jean-Pierre Seguin, in Comment est née la Bpi.
Consult the photographic record of the opening day made by Isabelle Giannattasio.