The future equipment will be located in Carcassonne, and will bring together three of the existing media libraries by 2026. The architectural competition will be open this summer.
The territory of Carcassonne Agglo is not lacking in media libraries, starting with the city centre. These facilities certainly have the merit of linking a network, but none has the scope of these large sites bringing together thousands of archives, DVDs, books and other documents. Such a gondola head will exist in Carcassonne within three years: it is in any case the wish of the agglomeration, whose last community council, Friday April 7, ratified the launch of the long road towards the concretization of this project. of scale.
The Grain d’sel media library is one of the three sites to be grouped together in the future equipment.
The future media library will thus be established “in the GRDF car park”nearly “just in front” of the Carcassonne Agglo headquarters. It will bring together three of the four current Carcassonne facilities: Grain d’aile, Grain d’sel and Montquiers. Only Grain d’art, at the Fabrique des arts, will remain in place. “We will also repatriate documentary funds currently located in the Departmental Archivesspecifies the president Régis Banquet. We needed a real place to present this fabulous written heritage, which contains treasures that cannot be shown at present”. This will eventually be the case, over 3,700 m2. But the upcoming site will not only look to the past.
Streamline costs
“We are also thinking about the future, but the future is youth and openness. This media library is also for it that we are building it!” At a time when a student campus is about to emerge from the ground in the city center, Régis Banquet affirms that this XXL media library will also integrate “a university library”as “a toy library for children and their parents”. And the president hopes that this future cultural beacon will encourage as many people as possible to discover and be curious. “People currently tend to lock themselves into territories, social classes, boxes, when on the contrary it would be necessary to go towards the world!”
Estimated between “12 and 13 M€”this achievement should become a reality by 2026. “We are in the middle of a financial package, the official requests have not yet left, but we already have the oral commitments of our partners, including in particular the support of the State”. The City and the Region are also united behind the project: the studies are already going well, and barring unforeseen events, the architectural competition will be launched in June. But Régis Banquet does not hide it either: in the long term, this investment will also bring its share… of savings. “We are tenants in Montquiers and Grain d’aile, and of course we pay for electricity in all our media libraries. Overall, combining three of them will save 200,000 euros per year.” Or when a media library also promotes the culture of management.
