Reflection on the Evolution of Audiovisual Media in Libraries

Libraries are facing the disappearance of physical audiovisual media. This technical transformation calls, in my view, for an anthropological redefinition of their missions (in the audiovisual field) around participatory creation and digital sovereignty.

The historical adaptation of libraries to publishing transformations

The library institution has historically welcomed publishing in all its forms. First paper, naturally. Then, when publishing extended to the phonogram with Edison’s invention in 1877, and subsequently to the videogram, libraries, with the BNF leading the way, adapted to the evolutions of the world, culture, and usage patterns. This capacity for adaptation particularly distinguishes libraries from other cultural institutions: they remain the cultural venue that has evolved the most in its missions and forms to stay attuned to citizens’ cultural needs.

Cinemas, theaters, or concert halls have retained much more fixed forms since their creation. Libraries, on the other hand, have demonstrated remarkable agility that positions them as spearheads for questions of technological evolution and usage patterns. This avant-garde position doesn’t only concern their own missions: their explorations and experiments serve the entire cultural sector, creating reproducible models and best practices.

I observe that this capacity for adaptation is inscribed in a long tradition, one that Eugène Morel already evoked in 1908 in Bibliothèques: “The library is not a museum of books, it is a public reading service.” This vision already foreshadowed the necessity for libraries to continually adapt to the changing needs of their audiences, well beyond simple conservation.

The paradox of dematerialization: when audiovisual media precedes the book

When personal computing began to democratize in the 1980s, the disappearance of the paper book was announced, to be replaced by digital reading. Nicholas Negroponte, in Being Digital (1995), even predicted the end of paper by the year 2000. Yet, an unexpected reversal occurred: it is audiovisual media, historically much more recent than book media, that is massively disappearing in favor of dematerialization.

This dematerialization concerns only usage, not materiality itself. Films, music, video games, and interactive applications remain materially stored in data centers. It is their access that now occurs remotely, a transformation made possible by an almost unique technical criterion: the exponential increase in digital bandwidth. Between 2010 and 2023, for example, the average global bandwidth increased from 1.7 Mbps to over 50 Mbps, enabling widespread streaming.

This evolution mechanically leads to the disappearance of physical media in libraries. Yet, we remain faced with editorial objects that remain at the heart of citizens’ cultural practices. The library therefore retains, in my view, its full and complete mission, but renewed, of making available, creating, and preserving audiovisual works in all their emerging forms. Here are my analyses and working directions.

The revolution of usage: from passive consultation to participatory creation

The democratization of audiovisual production tools, coupled with their disintermediated distribution via digital networks, causes a complete redefinition of the notion of work and the respective positions of receiver and transmitter, creator and spectator. The TikTok application, major in usage patterns, especially among young people, for example, perfectly illustrates this transformation: contrary to common belief, this platform is primarily used for educational purposes. Users spontaneously train themselves there, as they did on YouTube, but with a fundamental difference: TikTok is not only a distribution tool but also one of integrated creation, and it is currently the only one. You can respond in video, shoot, edit, publish, annotate, all within a single application.

This technical object strangely realizes the vision that Jean-Luc Godard expressed in his Histoire(s) du cinéma: that of a tool allowing one to “make films like writing letters”, for friends, integrating all functions simultaneously. This convergence also recalls the original Lumière cinematograph of 1895, which was both camera and projector.

This paradigm shift perfectly illustrates the transition from “cultural democratization” to “cultural democracy.” As Patrice Meyer-Bisch formulates in his definition of cultural rights (2007): “Everyone, alone or in community, has the right to participate in cultural life, which includes the right to develop and share cultural knowledge and expressions.” Traditional hierarchization, based on aesthetic or notoriety criteria established by legitimating authorities, finds itself deeply questioned, and this opens new and exciting fields.

Libraries as spaces for democratic fabrication

Libraries are already developing numerous cultural actions around audiovisual media: digital, audiovisual, video game, musical creative proposals, etc. The library as a “place of making” reveals all its relevance, as collective making in a territory responds to clearly identified citizen needs. These spaces offer a necessary alternative to commercial social networks where, certainly, a form of cultural democracy is exercised, but also what I call “algorithmic violence.”

In my opinion, productions created within libraries should enter into a systematic heritage preservation process. Beyond their traditional strictly patrimonial function, libraries must preserve creations but also traces of their own cultural activity. This “territorial narrative” seems absolutely necessary to me so that each participant can give value to their own experience. It is about highlighting the human, creative, and democratic processes whose essence lies in the journey rather than just the visible result. I have conducted numerous experiments in this direction in libraries.

These processes must be preserved as such in libraries, and this preservation largely involves audiovisual traces. As Michel de Certeau writes in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980): “Space is a practiced place.” Libraries can become these spaces where the living memory of territories is practiced and preserved, no longer merely as repositories of works from elsewhere, but as producers and guardians of local cultural expressions.

Toward digital sovereignty for libraries

This approach could refound the library as a space for citizen heritage preservation. The technical implementation remains relatively simple: making digital elements available on dedicated, secure, and sovereign servers. This digital sovereignty would create connections: remote consultation of each library’s specific heritage, echoing its territory, would all the more stimulate attendance at the physical place itself.

I have experimented with this approach numerous times, and the result is systematically convincing. Sovereign digital becomes a linking factor without diving into the logic of commercial social networks, which never correspond to public service logic. Moreover, public partnerships with private digital actors prove almost systematically detrimental to public interests, as Shoshana Zuboff demonstrated in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2020).

Within this citizen audiovisual heritage preservation, which would allow the library to occupy a renewed central place in the territorial narrative, could also include the provision of more traditional works. Rights could be negotiated at the territorial level, and careful editorialization would allow coordinated discoverability between territorial productions and external productions. This approach would make concrete the link between small history and grand history, between local memory and universal heritage.

Rethinking the mission of libraries in the face of anthropological mutations

The disappearance of audiovisual media is not merely a technical subject. It represents above all an anthropological issue that modifies everyone’s position vis-à-vis these productions. If libraries have a future in the audiovisual field, they must acknowledge the fundamental changes in human beings’ relationship to audiovisual production and the democracy at play there today.

Public authorities can choose to cultivate and encourage this audiovisual democracy, or ignore it. In the latter case, the library would lose its capacity to activate and animate the audiovisual narrative of territories, thus failing in what seems to me to be one of its essential emerging missions. As Bernard Stiegler emphasizes in Technics and Time (1994), we face a “new organology” that requires rethinking the relationships between technical, physiological, and social organs.

I propose here not a “solution,” but just a framework for reflection that articulates the new democratic aspect of audiovisual creation with heritage issues. This proposal aims to open discussion on the future role of libraries as spaces for creation, preservation, and dissemination of a living, participatory, and sovereign territorial audiovisual memory. Libraries can become the guarantors of a public and democratic alternative to commercial platforms, offering citizens the means to construct and preserve their own cultural narrative.

This text is the contribution of Benoît Labourdette for the launch of the steering committee of the National Consultation on the Future of Cinema and Audiovisual Media in Public Libraries.

(photograph from Bruno Bouchard’s archive)