Bruno Racine, former President of the National Library of France, on the Role of National Libraries
Bruno Racine was President of the National Library of France\xa0from 2007- 2016. Prior to this he held a variety of senior positions within the French government including: Director General Cultural Affairs for the City of Paris (1988-1993), Director of l\u2019Acad\xe9mie de France \xe0 Rome (1997-2002), and Chairman du Centre Pompidou (2002-2007).
He is also a writer. Non-fiction titles include his best-selling: Art of living in Rome and Art of living in Tuscany. His novel The Governor of Mor\xe9e (Grasset) won France\u2019s First Novel Prize in 1982.
We talk here about the role of a national library, about scanning and digitization, Google, the Lyon library (France\u2019s second largest), Europeana, the value-added offered by Librarians, amalgamation of Canada's National Archives and Library and the unlikelihood that France will follow suit, public servant novelists, Stendhal, and failure and success in work and love.
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