The acquisition policy of the Bibliothèque de France

The building of the new Bibliothèque de France gives the opportunity of an important change of scale in the acquisition policy followed till now by the Bibliothèque nationale. This levelling with comparable institutions such as the British Library means a new distribution between disciplines and an effort towards science, law, economy, politics and social science for which foreign acquisitions were less developed in the past than humanities. The important open access collections (800 000 books in the end) in the new reading rooms will allow to give a new signification to a coordinated policy between foreign acquisitions and the Legal Deposit in the perspective of a well-balanced encyclopedism. These books and reviews will bring new tools to work on the patrimonial collections as well as a better understanding of contemporary research. Their lines of development will also allow a better integration in the French library network. An exceptional acquisition programme is now being operated by the Etablissement public de la Bibliothèque de France in Ivry, with the help of several commissions including BN and external experts from the universities and the main research libraries.
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