Paris
While he was giving his traditional Bastille day speech on July 14th 1988, President François Mitterrand announced live on television the construction of the biggest library in the world. A year later, a jury managed by Pei (the architect of the Louvre Pyramid) gave the huge project to the architect Perrault. The works began in 1990, and lasted 6 years until the library was inaugurated on December 20th, 1996.
That was about consecrating one of the nicest modern monuments, with its 4 towers («Time», «Laws», «Knowledge» and «Letters and Figures»). Unfortunately, François Mitterrand, who died in January 1996, could not see the achievement of what remains one of his big Presidency works, with the Louvre Pyramid, the La Défense Big Arch, and the Bastille Opera.
The French National Library's collections are divided within 4 sites (Richelieu, François Mitterrand, Arsenal, and Library-Museum of the Opera), and shelters :
- more than 13 million books and printed papers ;
- 250,000 manuscripts ;
- 350,000 newspaper collections ;
- about 12 million prints, photographs and posters ;
- more than 800,000 maps ;
- 2 million music scores ;
- 1 million sound documents ;
- 530,000 mints and medals ;
- several tens of thousands of videos and multimedia documents.