As part of the French national project on the future of audiovisual media in public libraries, a series of so-called “political” hearings was held in June 2026. Here I set out what they taught us, together with the personal convictions I carry, and the advocacy document written collectively on 6 July 2026 at the BnF.
A national project, and hearings to raise the question of meaning
The National Project for the Future of Audiovisual Media in Public Libraries is a consultation led by the French Ministry of Culture, together with Images en Bibliothèques and the CNC. For a year, seven working groups bringing together more than eighty librarians dealt with the concrete questions of the profession, from physical collections to training, cultural programming and spaces, on the basis of a questionnaire answered in spring 2025 by 420 professionals representing more than 500 establishments. I recount the whole of this adventure, which concluded with a public restitution day on 6 July 2026 at the BnF, in another article (link to be inserted), and all the work is available on the project’s website: https://projetnational-av-bib.fr/.
Within the steering committee, I carried with Pascale Issartel a particular strand of this undertaking: a series of hearings we called “political”, held in June 2026 while the working groups were completing their deliverables. We met the ADRC, the national agency for the development of cinema in the regions; the associations of elected officials, that is the FNCC, the Association des maires de France and Départements de France; the professional associations, the ABF and the FILL; the Observatoire des politiques culturelles; and the filmmaker Julie Bertuccelli, president of the Cinémathèque du documentaire. The working groups looked at the profession from the inside; with these hearings we were after something else: to listen to people who look at libraries from outside the network, and to put to them the question of meaning. Why does a local authority support audiovisual media in its library? What is a public policy of images on a territory? It seemed important to me that this subject be carried politically, because without a narrative of what libraries mean for their territory, beyond their heritage alone, there is no local funding, and without local funding there is quite simply no content within their walls.
Budgets under strain, and elected officials asking to understand
The hearing with the associations of elected officials is the one that shifted us the most, because it put back before our eyes a context that we, as cultural professionals, tend to lose sight of. The departments manage 5,300 public lower secondary schools and expect, given demographic projections, to close several hundred of them within ten years, with around 600,000 fewer pupils. More than two thirds of their budgets go to social spending, so that the so-called shared competences, culture among them, are, in their own words, always the first to be “in a delicate position”. Added to this is a heavy electoral sequence, the presidential election followed closely by the departmental elections in 2027, meaning new teams to meet everywhere, when the recent municipal elections have already reshuffled the cards. One representative of the departments went so far as to wonder aloud in front of us whether we would still see libraries in ten years’ time. He answered himself that yes, we would, but the fact that the question can be asked says a great deal about the climate.
Within this landscape, two things struck me. First, elected officials see the mutation of the librarian’s profession. They see it from where they stand, and they perceive professionals in deep questioning, a model of the French media library inherited from the 1980s and 1990s that is looking for its sequel. The president of the FNCC described the trajectory of staff trained thirty years ago, then at the cutting edge, who came to feel overtaken by dematerialisation, then dispossessed, then demotivated. He also defended the popular vocation of these libraries, made so that the person who loves Sardou can find the Sardou record there, and not only for those who already have the intellectual and financial means to reach the most legitimised works.
Second, elected officials are asking for dialogue: “Help us to understand what libraries have become, what happens there, what is at stake there, so that we can defend them.” They point out, moreover, that the library is France’s foremost cultural facility, present in nearly two out of three municipalities, while barely 17% of municipalities and intermunicipal bodies have a cinema. From this request was born, during these hearings, the idea of a guide for elected officials on the evolution of library uses. It is this idea that gave rise to the writing workshop for an advocacy document, a “plaidoyer”, which took place during the project’s restitution day on 6 July 2026, and which I facilitated. A local elected official summed up her method after twelve years in office: never impose a model, solutions are local, help those who have ideas.
The tension between the local and the common
The professional associations, the ABF and the FILL, painted the picture of an extremely diverse landscape. Decentralisation produces numerous and inventive local initiatives, such as the work carried out since the late 1980s in Brittany around films produced on that territory, but also quick decisions taken with a short view, a digital offer discontinued in one department while it develops in another, music collections closed simply because a retirement was not replaced. We no longer live in a world where every inhabitant, wherever they live, is guaranteed the same access to the same resources. One question ran through the whole of this hearing: is a national policy still needed, and which one, when so much is now decided locally? It remained open, and I believe it lies at the heart of the subject.
Emmanuel Vergès, co-director of the Observatoire des politiques culturelles, gave this tension its conceptual framework. He approaches libraries as one of the facilities of a territorial cultural policy, and he describes them as those that most deeply embody cultural rights: interdisciplinary, intergenerational, open to everyone and almost all the time. Much is now decided locally, and that is a richness; “the peripheries”, he says, “are more intelligent than the centre”. But fragmentation without a state guarantee would produce nothing but territorial interests, citadels. Hence his insistence on what he calls the multilateralism of cultural policies, policies that compose themselves, that seek balances between the state and local authorities, with common references rather than norms. Equal treatment does not mean identical answers everywhere; each territory will mobilise different resources for a shared common. He has this formula, which he owns as a pirouette: “today, the common is diversity”.
His sharpest warning concerns the temptation, widespread among librarians, of a great state cultural platform that would give access to works. The dematerialisation of public services has left behind the fifteen to twenty per cent of the population in a situation of digital exclusion and produced what the Défenseure des droits, the French Defender of Rights, calls non-take-up; a centralised cultural platform would in the same way produce cultural non-take-up, without diversity or discoverability, with an editorialisation from above. He cited, by contrast, the media library of Lezoux, where “everything is done with the inhabitants”, and he concluded on a sentence that situates the debate well: “The state must continue to uphold the requirement of the general interest.”
The end of physical media is not a technical fate
Emmanuel Vergès brought another displacement, which seems to me important for anyone thinking through the politics of this subject. What he calls the crisis of functions of cultural facilities stems first from a transformation of public economies, in which the general interest is assigned the logic of market neutrality, and culture is thought of in terms of offers rather than uses and practices. In this reading, the disappearance of physical media is less a matter of technology than an economic operation, a small number of publishers recapitalising their catalogues in order to refinancialise them, as happened in the shift from vinyl to CD, and today from DVD to platforms. Faced with this, he recalls that libraries have fulfilled two functions for millennia, preserving traces and making them accessible, whatever the medium, from clay tablets to the codex, and that the end of one medium transforms the conditions in which these functions are exercised without calling them into question. But if libraries do not take charge of archiving digital traces, this function of building a society’s history will be left to platforms whose lifespan is far shorter than theirs.
Cooperation between facilities is built over time
The ADRC, created in 1983 so that cinema would reach everywhere the market alone does not guarantee a quality offer, brought a long experience of cooperation between cinemas and media libraries, which it describes as twin facilities: one goes there with one’s children, at every age, in an intimate, everyday relationship to the place, and the disappearance of either is always a bad signal for the dynamics of a local authority. The Mycéliades festival, which it runs with Images en Bibliothèques in eighty towns, pairs in each town a cinema and a library around shared events. What they say about it is precious for decision-makers: building this articulation took years, because the calendars, the statuses, the ways of programming are not the same. Cooperation between the facilities of a territory is fertile, but it cannot be decreed; it takes time and work. Cinemas also see in media libraries a relay for works they can hardly programme any more, heritage films, local productions, the amateur films preserved by regional film archives.
Julie Bertuccelli confirmed this view from the side of creation. Asked whether someone from the audiovisual world, a filmmaker and president of the Cinémathèque du documentaire, still sees media libraries, her answer is yes, without hesitation: she regards them as an essential place for the circulation of documentary film, and as one of the last places where a diversity of works remains accessible at little cost, since the closing of the video rental shops. She insisted on practices, getting children and inhabitants to make films themselves, on partnerships with cinemas, and on the quality of collective viewing. The care given to screening conditions is the value given to the work and to the people in the room.
Image education, on everyone’s lips
Image education came back in every hearing, without exception, as a democratic stake in a society saturated with images that can be manipulated at will. Elected officials raised it constantly. Julie Bertuccelli pointed to a paradox: in a world flooded with images, image education, which is not to be confused with media and information literacy, remains an option, a variable, with very few resources. The CNC presented its plan for the refoundation of image education, fifteen measures announced in November 2025, in which libraries appear at several points, notably a support fund for innovative schemes conditional on partnership between several structures, and the prospect of conservatories dedicated to cinema, on the model of the conservatories for music, theatre and dance, in which libraries could take their place.
What I carry: the citizen patrimonialisation of a territory’s images
I come now to two points that did not emerge from the hearings and that I therefore present as personal convictions. I am not seeking to impose them, but it seems useful to me to set them out in detail, because in my view they touch on the anthropological meaning of what is at stake. I had laid them out in a reflection paper written at the start of the project, in October 2025.
The first point starts from an observation about uses. The democratisation of audiovisual production tools, coupled with their disintermediated circulation through digital networks, is redefining the respective positions of creator and spectator. Everyone produces images today, as families once shot their home movies, and applications such as TikTok, whatever one may think of them otherwise, integrate within a single tool shooting, editing, publishing and replying in video. This technical object strangely fulfils what Jean-Luc Godard called for in his Histoire(s) du cinéma, making films the way one writes letters, and recalls the original Lumière cinematograph of 1895, which was both camera and projector. This shift illustrates the passage from cultural democratisation to cultural democracy, in the sense Patrice Meyer-Bisch gives to cultural rights: everyone, alone or in common, has the right to take part in cultural life, which includes the right to develop and share cultural expressions.
Yet this audiovisual democracy is exercised today almost exclusively on commercial social networks, where what I call an algorithmic violence also reigns, and whose logics never correspond to those of public service, as Shoshana Zuboff showed in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). In my view, media libraries have a role to take in a territorial network for preserving what is produced locally, on the model of what institutions such as the Cinémathèque de Bretagne have long done for amateur and family films, and including what is made within their own walls. For libraries everywhere run cultural activities around images, and these activities leave very few traces. For lack of a narrative, all this human and creative investment remains invisible, particularly in the eyes of elected officials, for whom it then becomes difficult to defend. To make a narrative of what is lived in media libraries is to make possible the political narrative, that of the meaning of these places on their territory.
Michel de Certeau wrote that space is a practised place; media libraries can become the places where the living memory of territories is practised and preserved, no longer only as custodians of works come from elsewhere, but as producers and keepers of local cultural expressions. The technical implementation is relatively simple, dedicated, secure and sovereign servers, and I have been able to observe, in the experiments I have carried out in libraries, that remote consultation of a library’s own heritage, echoing its territory, makes people all the more inclined to visit the physical place itself. The hearing with elected officials showed, moreover, that this subject meets a real interest: the president of the FNCC, a historian by training, was looking for an equivalent of the Cinémathèque de Bretagne for his own region, and imagined a voluntary cooperation between local authorities to create a place of collection, since none of them alone has the human and technical means for audiovisual archiving.
The second point, which is not ripe either but which seems important to me: people also come to the library to make things. To make images, to make music, to build objects, and to benefit for that from resources, expertise, equipment and support. The library as a place of making answers clearly identified citizen needs, and offers a public alternative to commercial platforms for the exercise of this ordinary creativity. What I am proposing here is not a solution, just a framework for reflection that articulates the new democratic dimension of audiovisual creation with heritage stakes, and that aims to open the discussion on the future role of libraries as spaces for the creation, preservation and circulation of a living territorial audiovisual memory.
The advocacy document written collectively on 6 July 2026
The request for dialogue formulated by elected officials found a first concrete answer during the restitution day of 6 July 2026, in a writing workshop that I facilitated. This article recounts how it unfolded. A dozen participants wrote there the first drafts of an advocacy document on the role of libraries for audiovisual media, addressed to elected officials. The full document is attached to this article; here is its substance.
The advocacy document starts from the Robert Law of 21 December 2021, which entrusts libraries with guaranteeing equal access for all to culture and cites audiovisual media among their collections. It then re-establishes a few facts against the received idea of a disappearance of physical media: France counts around 3,000 video releases a year and more than 100 publishers supported by the CNC, for a market of 170 million euros, against 70 for transactional video on demand, and 18-25 year olds are the leading buyers of Blu-ray. On certain art-house or documentary films, the acquisitions of media libraries represent 30 to 50% of the pressed volume, so that by buying films, the library directly supports French creation and publishing. It contrasts the durability of collections with the shifting offer of the platforms, where one rents access time without ever acquiring anything, and recalls that the attractiveness of media libraries was built on the multi-media model: between 1998 and 2023, the share of French people who use them rose from 23% to 37%. It describes the young audience, which represents up to half of users, the librarian’s role as a trusted prescriber facing closed catalogues and algorithms, collections as a way out of recommendation bubbles, complementarity with cinemas, schools, care homes and associations, and it concludes on image education as a stake of citizenship. This text, written by professionals in the short time of a workshop, is a first draft, and it already contains what the participants called elements of language, usable in everyday dialogue with decision-makers.
What runs through all of this
All these hearings, without exception, testify to the decline in resources, at every level, the state as well as local authorities. All of them also testify to the vitality of local initiatives. And all of them arrive at the same necessity: to work at the local level while preserving common visions and the general interest, and for that, to federate. Locally, between facilities and between sectors; nationally, between institutions. The political stake of supporting audiovisual media in libraries is in this sense multipolar. It plays out in the budgets of local authorities as in national law and schemes, in cooperation between the facilities of a single territory, in the education of the gaze, and even in the recognition of what inhabitants themselves produce as images. None of these poles is sufficient on its own, and that is exactly why this subject calls for tools of dialogue between professionals and elected officials. The advocacy document of 6 July 2026 is a first one, modest and perfectible, and the idea of a guide for elected officials, born of the hearings, now remains to be built.
