From the third network to offsite provision

The term “third network” began to be used in France in the early 1990s to refer to a heterogeneous set of libraries and providers of reading matter other than municipal or département lending libraries. This “third network” has often been a precursor in providing services to specific sectors of the community, a role that the public library service itself wished to take on in the late 1990s through a dynamic outreach policy. It became clear that there was a need to develop partnerships with other libraries through offsite provision of library facilities –a process which proved more or less straightforward.
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