Paris. PARIS students were among the first readers to queue for the 1,697 seats in the general public's reading rooms of the national library, which opened last week just two months behind schedule.
For library-starved students in the French capital, the Pounds 1 billion library, named after former president Francois Mitterrand, is a major asset. But academics will have to wait until the end of 1998 for the research library to open.
By then, ten years will have passed since President Mitterrand unveiled the plan for a national library of "an entirely new kind". In 1989, architect Dominique Perrault won the contract with his controversial four-tower design; in 1990, building started.
However, much of the original formula for a futuristic, virtual library investing heavily in multi-media was lost during the race to finish the edifice before the end of Mitterrand's second term of office.
The public library catalogue is now on CD-Rom but the computerised six-million item general catalogue will not be fully operational before late 1998.
The national collective catalogue linking all of France's academic libraries will not be functioning before the year 2000. The number of workstations and of fully catalogued books and documents has also been scaled down.
Budgetary restrictions are partly responsible for the library not being of an "entirely new kind".
Although the design specifications have been lavish, with deep carpets, precious hardwoods, Pounds 350 seats and Pounds 750 lamps, staff posts have been frozen and acquisitions trimmed back. The old national library had 650 seats and 1,200 staff. The new one will have around 2,000 staff for a total of 3,600 seats. Annual acquisitions have dropped from 110,000 volumes to 92,000.
The complicated transfer of ten million volumes from the old to the new research library will undoubtedly give rise to more of the polemic that has marked the project throughout. The role of the public library is also drawing comment. Open to anyone over 18 or with a baccalaureate, it is laid out by subject area exactly along the lines of the research library.
Critics say it should have been made into a university library for Paris. Its running budget would then have come from the education ministry. But library directors say it is a high-level public library aimed at serving both students and a broader public.
Students will pay just Ff100 (Pounds 11.40) a year for unlimited access to the expected 300,000-volume collection. Another issue raising a lot of interest is who will succeed library head Jean Favier who retires at the end of the month.