5 December 2025

10:55 AM – 12:30 PM

Amphi Grand Kursaal

Pierre Emmanuel Guilleray

Pierre Emmanuel is a librarian on secondment to Grand Besançon Métropole from the Ministry of Culture, working at the Besançon Municipal Library. Trained at the École des Chartes and the École des Bibliothèques, he worked mainly in the rare books department of the Besançon library from 2007 to 2017 and from 2021 to the present. He has also worked in a university library in Besançon and in media libraries in Mauritius and Nancy. These experiences are interesting because they provide an outside perspective on library heritage, which is very different from media libraries and undoubtedly closer to museums in many ways. He also works directly with the Besançon Municipal Archives, as they are part of the same department as the libraries and share the same reading room for library heritage.

What are the limits of heritage conservation?

France, like every other country, has a rich and diverse heritage that must be preserved for the sake of its people’s history, social cohesion, education, economy, tourism, and research. From decorated caves with a delicate climate threatened by global warming to handwritten and digital archives that are constantly being created, not to mention the works, objects, and specimens in museums and galleries that must be preserved in perpetuity, we are reaching the limits of conservation, ecological limits, and organizational and management limits. So should we preserve everything? This question is one that all heritage institutions (museums, archives, libraries, archaeological services, historic monuments) face, each responding according to its legal framework and professional practices. Archives, which are unique by nature, are subject to a strict selection protocol. Libraries, faced with a mass of printed material, must preserve books published before 1830 but may carry out selective weeding for later works. Archaeology selects the movable archaeological property to be preserved, while museums question their acquisition policy, aware that each new object added to their inventory becomes inalienable. In all areas of heritage, selection is a fundamental act.But beyond the law and customs, other limitations arise: those of saturated spaces, limited financial resources, and overworked teams. Conservation also has an ecological cost. In the face of climate change, the risks of disasters are multiplying, while the measures used to conserve heritage (air conditioning, petroleum-based packaging, transport) weigh heavily on institutions’ carbon footprints. Heritage professionals are therefore faced with a major paradox: preserving the vestiges of the past to pass them on to future generations, but sometimes at the cost of damaging the environment. Using specific examples, particularly from the collections of Besançon’s museums (the Museums of Art and Time, the Natural History Museum, the Museum of Resistance and Deportation, and the Comtois Museum) and municipal libraries and archives, specialists will present the choices made to ensure that future generations can also take care of these shared assets.