As part of the national project for the future of audiovisual media in public libraries, a series of hearings described as “political” was conducted in June 2026. Here I set out what they taught us, together with the personal convictions I bring to the subject, 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 Ministry of Culture, with Images en Bibliothèques and the CNC. For a year, seven working groups involving more than eighty librarians dealt with the concrete questions of the profession, from physical collections to training by way of cultural programming and spaces, on the basis of a questionnaire to which 420 professionals representing more than 500 establishments had responded in spring 2025. I tell the story of this whole adventure, which ended with a presentation day on 6 July 2026 at the BnF, in another article, and all the work can be consulted on the project website: https://projetnational-av-bib.fr/.
Within the steering committee, together with Pascale Issartel I led one particular strand of this undertaking: a series of hearings we called “political”, conducted in June 2026, while the working groups were finishing 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: hearing from players who look at libraries from outside the network, and putting to them the question of meaning. Why does a local authority support audiovisual media in its media library? What is a public policy of images in a territory? It seemed important to me that this subject be championed politically, because without a narrative of the importance of libraries in 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 most, because it put back before our eyes a context that we, as cultural players, tend to lose sight of. The departments run 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 find themselves “in a delicate position”. Added to this is a heavy electoral sequence, the presidential election followed immediately by the departmental elections in 2027, which means new teams to meet everywhere, when the municipal elections have only just reshuffled the cards. One representative of the departments went so far as to wonder aloud before us whether there would still be libraries in ten years’ time. He answered his own question with a yes, but the fact that the question can be asked at all says a great deal about the climate.
In this landscape, two things struck me. First, elected officials see the transformation of the librarian’s profession. They see it from where they stand, and what they perceive is professionals deep in self-questioning, a model of the media library inherited from the 1980s and 1990s whose next chapter remains to be invented. The president of the FNCC described the trajectory of staff trained thirty years ago, then at the cutting edge, who felt overtaken by dematerialisation, then dispossessed, then demotivated. He also defended the popular vocation of media libraries, made so that someone 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 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 municipalities out of three, when barely 17% of municipalities and inter-municipal bodies have a cinema. From this request was born, during these hearings, the idea of a guide for elected officials on changing uses in libraries. It is this idea that gave rise to the workshop for writing an “advocacy document”, which took place during the project’s presentation day on 6 July 2026 and which I facilitated. One 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 many inventive local initiatives, such as the work carried out in Brittany since the late 1980s around films produced in the region, but also quick decisions taken with a short view: a digital offer discontinued in one department while it develops in another, music collections ended simply by not replacing a member of staff who retires. 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 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 the library as one of the facilities of a territorial cultural policy, and he describes it as the one that most deeply embodies 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 only territorial interests, citadels. Hence his insistence on what he calls the multilateralism of cultural policies, policies that work things out among 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 flourish: “today, the common is diversity”.
His sharpest warning concerns a temptation widespread among librarians, that of a great State cultural platform giving access to works. The dematerialisation of public services has left behind the fifteen to twenty per cent of the population affected by digital exclusion and produced what the Défenseure des droits (the French rights defender) calls non-take-up; a centralised cultural platform would in the same way produce cultural non-take-up, without diversity or discoverability, with editorialisation from the top. He cited by contrast the Lezoux media library, where “everything is done with the inhabitants”, and he concluded with a sentence that frames 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 shift, which seems to me important for anyone thinking about the politics of this subject. What he calls the crisis of the functions of cultural facilities stems first from a transformation of public economies, in which the general interest has the logic of market neutrality applied to it, 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 “re-financialise” them, as when vinyl gave way to the CD, and today the DVD to the platforms. Against this, he recalls that libraries have performed two functions for millennia, preserving traces and making them accessible, whatever the medium, from clay tablets to the codex, and that the end of a medium transforms the conditions in which those functions are exercised without calling them into question. But if libraries do not take on the archiving of digital traces, this function of building a society’s history will be left to platforms whose lifespan is far shorter than theirs.
Complementarity between facilities is built over time
The ADRC, created in 1983 so that cinema would reach everywhere the market does not by itself ensure a quality offer, brought long experience of cooperation between cinemas and media libraries, which it describes as twin facilities: you go there with your children, at every age, in an intimate, everyday relationship with the place, and the disappearance of either is always a bad signal for the dynamism of a community. The Mycéliades festival, which it runs with Images en Bibliothèques in eighty towns, pairs a cinema and a library in each town around shared activities. Their experience 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 fruitful, 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 the regional film archives.
Julie Bertuccelli brought the viewpoint of creation. Asked whether an audiovisual professional, 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 video clubs closed. She insisted on practices, getting children and inhabitants to make films, on partnerships with cinemas, and on the quality of collective viewing. The care we take over screening conditions is the value we give to the work and to the people who are there.
Image education, in every hearing
Image education came up in every single hearing, without exception, as a democratic issue in a society saturated with images that can be manipulated at will. Elected officials mentioned 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 little funding. The CNC presented its plan to rebuild 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 conservatoires dedicated to cinema, along the lines of the conservatoires for music, theatre and dance, in which libraries could find their place.
Making the images of the territory into a citizens’ heritage
I come now to two points that did not emerge from the hearings and that I therefore present as personal convictions. I am not trying to impose them, but it seems useful to me to set them out in some detail, because in my view they touch on the anthropological meaning of what is at stake. I had set them down 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 distribution 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 otherwise think of them, bring together in a single tool shooting, editing, publishing and video reply. This technical object oddly fulfils what Jean-Luc Godard called for in his Histoire(s) du cinéma, making films the way one writes letters, and recalls the 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 community, 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 algorithmic violence also reigns, and whose logics never match those of public service, as Shoshana Zuboff showed in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019). To my mind, media libraries have a role to play 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. Making a narrative of what is lived in media libraries is what makes the political narrative possible, the narrative of the meaning of these places in 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 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 observed, in the experiments I have carried out in libraries, that remote consultation of a media library’s own heritage, echoing its territory, feeds attendance at the physical place itself, far from turning people away from it. The hearing with elected officials showed, moreover, that this subject meets with 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 voluntary cooperation between local authorities for a collection site, since none of them alone has the human and technical means for audiovisual archiving.
The second point, no riper than the first, 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 this from resources, expertise, equipment, support. The library as a place of making answers identified citizens’ needs, and offers a public alternative to commercial platforms for the exercise of this ordinary creativity. I am not proposing a solution here, only a framework for thinking that links the new democratic dimension of audiovisual creation with heritage issues, 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 voiced by elected officials found a first concrete answer during the presentation day on 6 July 2026, in a writing workshop that I facilitated. This article tells how it unfolded. A dozen participants wrote there the first drafts of an advocacy document on the role of libraries for audiovisual media, aimed at 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 the mission of guaranteeing equal access to culture for all and names audiovisual media among their collections. It then sets a few facts against the received idea that physical media are disappearing: 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 pay-per-view video on demand, and 18-to-25-year-olds are the biggest buyers of Blu-rays. For certain auteur films or documentaries, media libraries’ acquisitions account for 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 multiple media: between 1998 and 2023, the share of French people who use them rose from 23% to 37%. It describes the young audience, who make up as much as half of users, the video librarian’s role as a trusted guide in the face of closed catalogues and algorithms, collections as a way out of recommendation bubbles, complementarity with cinemas, schools, care homes and associations, and it closes on image education as a matter 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 talking points, usable in everyday dialogue with decision-makers.
A multipolar issue
All these hearings testify to falling resources, at every level, the State and local authorities alike. All also testify to the vitality of local initiatives. And all conclude on the same necessity: working at local level while preserving shared visions and the general interest, and, to that end, federating. Locally, between facilities and between sectors; nationally, between institutions. The political stakes of support for audiovisual media in libraries are in this sense multipolar. They play out in local authorities’ budgets 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 in the way of images. None of these poles is enough on its own, and that is precisely why this subject calls for tools of dialogue between professionals and elected officials. The advocacy document of 6 July 2026 is a first such tool, modest and perfectible, and the guide for elected officials, the idea of which was born in the hearings, now remains to be built.
