The history of the Lyons Municipal Library started in 1565, when the town council assigned the management of the Collège de la Trinité (Trinity Secondary School) to the Jesuits, who started developing what became one of the best libraries in the country. The library became public in 1765, and then municipal in 1803, and was transferred to the new district of Part-Dieu in 1972 (World Book Year) where it was housed in a very large building which was the first of its type in France, built along the lines of the avant-garde libraries in the United Kingdom.
With over 3 million documents, the Lyons Municipal Library has built up its stock of documents over the years with extremely varied collections. For example, it holds a Carolingian library containing some manuscripts dating from the 10th century, 1200 incunabula, a very large number of 16th century printings from Lyons (Rabelais, Maurice Scève, etc.), the largest collection in the region of early music scores, archive discs and popular song scores, more than 120000 early engravings (Dürer, Rembrandt, Callot, etc.); a collection in Chinese of international reputation, large collections of photographs (André Kertesz, Robert Doisneau, William Klein, etc.), collections of nearly 13000 different magazines, newspapers, etc. of which 4000 are still functioning, and the Dépôt Légal (registration of copyright) for the 8 departments of the Rhône-Alpes region. In 1999, the Lyons Municipal Library acquired the 400000 volumes of the ‘Des Fontaines’ collection from the Chantilly Jesuits. The Part-Dieu Library, with a surface area of 27700 m², is still one of the largest municipal libraries in Europe. Its eight thematic departments, three exhibition halls and auditorium surround a ‘silo’ 17 floors high where books are stored. This library is also at the heart of a network of 5 libraries and 3 mobile libraries which employs more than 400 staff, is visited by 2.5 million people per year, and lends 3.1 million documents per year.
This network has never stopped growing (5 building projects are currently in progress), developing its organization and offering innovating new services. Among the latter, we could mention, amongst others its several multimedia areas, an art library, a shuttle service so that people borrowing items can return them to any library, a service taking books to the homes of disabled persons who can’t get about much, 15 areas for young children, the Guichet du Savoir (Knowledge Desk) (a question and answer service based on Internet), Point d’Actu! (All the Latest!) (an Internet documentary orientation service based on the latest news), a Rhône-Alpes documentation centre, another centre covering the latest artistic developments, and soon there will be ‘Cap culture santé’, a health-related service. Finally, let’s not forget that Lyons libraries organize more than 600 cultural events every year, which run from special events for very young children to large-scale documentary or artistic exhibitions.
