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The Bibliothèque Publique d'information (Bpi), a large public reference library, located inside the Centre Pompidou in Paris, welcomes visitors from students to professionals and including the homeless community. In order to precisely diagnose the situation, the Bpi asked the French sociologist Serge Paugam to conduct a study of all these poorly housed or homeless users (refugees, migrants, people with mental health issues, etc.). This paper seeks to address these issues.

The study was based on participant observations and in‐depth interviews throughout a six‐month period of time.

Paugam looks upon social downgrading as a process and he distinguishes three steps he calls “Fragility”, “Dependency”, and “Rupture”. His hypothesis stated that the three stages of this process should be observed in the library. This was proved to be true. Moreover, the survey finding showed there are links between the stage of the process where people happen to be and their uses of the library.

This is the first French study directed toward homeless library users. It shows that although a public library welcomes everyone, social inequalities do not disappear. The survey finding confirms the diversity of the public, even among those users with poor living conditions, and the difficulty to offer services relevant to everybody, in a large public library such as the Bpi. Should the library offer the same set of activities to all those it serves? Or should it target specific groups of users and operate programs to meet their specific needs?

Aims to assess and identify the main trends of shared conservation of library collections in France.

Presents two co‐existing approaches to the subject: first, an approach based on the principle of distributed conservation, spread around a certain number of establishments; and second, a centralised approach in which a given network of libraries shares pooled conservation. Compares drawbacks and advantages of these two approaches.

The drawbacks of the “distributed” system are as follows. Sometimes the participating libraries' lack of experience causes problems for the physical transfer of documents from one library to another. There is the risk of the scheme slowing down or stopping altogether. The advantages of this approach are that it can be launched without major initial investment. The “centralised” shared conservation system also has drawbacks. It requires an initial investment in terms of a building, capital equipment and job creation. However, this system has numerous advantages. The CTLes is seen as a real participant in the inter‐library cooperation network.

A new project in France will probably provide an opportunity to combine the two approaches. This is the shared conservation scheme for medical periodicals among university libraries in the Paris region (Ile de France). If it succeeds, the methodology used could be adopted or adapted to other disciplines and other regions.