Interview Dusoulier (2000) Rayward/Construction de l'INIST

Interview de Nathalie Dusoulier par W. Boyd Rayward en 2000

Construction de l'INIST

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Science History Institute Sommaire de la version numérique de l'interview de Nathalie Dusoulier par Byord Rayward Intoduction Nathalie Dusoulier, repères biographiques Entrée au Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) Institut de l’Information Scientifique et Technique (INIST) Conversation sur diverses organisations Carrière à l'INIST Index

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Avant-propos

Le texte qui suit est une traduction de la fin d'un ouvrage réalisé par le Chemical Heritage Foundation (Centre d'histoire de la chimie).

L'ensemble est une interview de Nathalie Dusoulier mené par W. Rayward à Nice en 2000.

Page en cours de traduction et de mise en forme

La traduction est un travail collectif mené dans la cadre du réseau Wicri. Elle est complétée par une indexation sémantique et par l'ajout d'une iconographie.

Construction de l'INIST

20

[Coupure dans l'enregistrement]

Dusoulier

Je lui ai dit : « Très bien, après le weekend, je vous écrirai » Then he said, “Oh, you know, you have to do it.” I said, “Yes, sure. I’m interested.” He said, “Because, you know, n'oubliez pas, vous étes en détachement —” I said, “Is that a way of threatening me? If I won’t be good, they won’t continue my secondment?” And I told him, “Oh, s'il vous plait, pas de chantage avec moi, car je peux rester aux Nations Unies aussi longtemps que je le veux.”And, of course, in CNRS, you have to stay until sixty-five. “I can stay until sixty-two, anyway, and you can stay two years more. You know, considering the money I’m getting here, I will have more money staying three years less in CNRS than two years more.” [laughter]

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Départ des Nations Unies

Dusoulier

He said, “No, that was not what I was trying to do.” I said, “All right.” Then he left. I showed him a little bit of what we were doing. After the weekend, I wrote thirty-two pages of comments on this thing. There were a lot of crazy things I could not understand. And I said that. Then I never heard about anything. Because there were problems in Geneva, the Comité Diplomatique said they didn’t want to pay any more money for the library because there were big problems there. The librarian said, “Over my dead body. There will be no computers in the library.” Finally, they negotiated that I could go to Geneva. I had almost finished my automation in New York, and I moved to Geneva. I was happy to move back to Geneva because my kids were in France. I was a little bit lonely. I went back to Geneva and began working. You cannot believe what Geneva was like. There were rooms full of books. If you opened the door, you just had to run very fast because, otherwise, everything was going to fall on you. [laughter] It was terrible. I started buying computers, doing automation, putting things in order in Geneva.

One day, two years later, I had a call. “I’m the secretary of the director of CRNS. He wants you to come tomorrow to see him.” I said, “Look, lady, [laughter] I am not working for you. The UN is paying me, and I just cannot. Again, it is during the General Assembly.” [laughter] She said, “Yes. So, when can you come?” I said, “I can come on Saturday.” Then I went on Saturday.. C'était dans une grande alle avec le directeur du CNRS, Goéry Delacôte, le directeur de l'information, et le directeur du personnel du CNRS. They said, “We were very happy about the comments you did,” et cetera. It happened in forty-five minutes. I was thinking, “They didn’t ask me to come from Geneva to listen to how they were happy about the report that I did.”

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They said, “Do you know why we have called you?” I said, “No, I have no idea.” “Well, because we want you to take over the INIST.”

Then, because I was so shocked, I asked a stupid question. I said, “But, I work for the UN and I have no intention of leaving. I have just renewed my contract for the next two years. What happened to Mr. Jakobiac?” He was supposed to take over INIST. I heard, during the two years, that this guy was in charge of INIST.

As soon as I asked the question, I knew that it was stupid because then they said, “Non, cela n’a pas marché; it didn’t work,” et cetera. I was a little bit surprised. They said, “We want you to start immediately.” I said, “Are you joking? I just, six months ago, came from New York. I cannot just leave the UN.” They said, “We are going to get someone to replace you.”

I said, “Look, there was a story in New York. The director of personnel didn’t want me to go to Geneva. Then Geneva said, ‘We cannot do without you. It’s very important,’ et cetera. There was a battle for me to go to Geneva. The director of the Geneva office is not going to accept that I’m being replaced just like that.” They said, “Then, we will find two people.” [laughter] “All right.”

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Kofi Annan

Dusoulier

Then I went to Geneva and talked to the director of the Geneva office—he was a Belgian man at the time. He said, “They are crazy. There is no way. Look, if you want to go back—” I said, “Look, this is my organization. They can force me to go back.” “They wouldn’t force you.” At the same time, the French said, “All right, we can force you.” But it would take two years—going to tribunal.

Finally, I negotiated that I could do some work with the conseil de projet (project council) on Saturdays and my vacation days. Which meant, in 1987, I didn’t have any vacation days. I used all my vacation days so that I could find someone to replace me in Geneva and that to give them time for the hiring process. In fact, it was Mr. Kofi Annan, the chief of personnel, who is now the director general. I met him in the French embassy and we negotiated my replacement.

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Les fondations de l'INIST

Dusoulier

Then the INIST story started. I discovered that it was going to be very difficult because all the people said, “It’s impossible. It cannot be done.” I talked to some of the people. “You’re crazy to try to do it,” they said. I said, “It could be interesting to start something.” But,all the people said, “No, it’s not feasible. It’s impossible.” INIST started with a lot of difficulties. I moved to Nancy. I was one person with only a secretary and her husband to help me.

Rayward

What were all the difficulties that people were referring to?

Dusoulier

The difficulties were that the CDST was not prepared to move. We had a library of twenty-seven thousand titles of periodicals on ten floors.

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We had to move all that, but we could not stop working. We had four thousand requests for photocopies a day at that time. A day! How do you continue to do that? We had to build a building and figure out where to put the staff. Then the staff didn’t want to go. Altogether, thirty people from the whole CNRS went. We had to recruit about three or four hundred people—newcomers—train them, and put them somewhere. When we recruited them, there was nowhere to sit; we had to rent space. Nous avons même été logés dans un petit château du XVIII^e siècle. In this castle alone with a secretary. [laughter] I had to rent in a building the rooms to put the people I was recruiting in. All these people had to be recruited through a National Caucus. It was competitions, because it’s administration. It was a post of a fonctionnaire (civil servant).

Recruitment was not so easy. I needed ten people as a jury. We had a written exam and then an oral one. We were recruiting twenty-five people at one time. I worked in five places: CDST, rue Boyer, where the remaining staff was; Boulevard Raspail, where CDSH was, the human sciences; and Château du Montet, where I was officially located. But, for political reasons, they wanted me to go there. I was an important person there. I had taken some other things, but we have not time to go through—from the press.

[END OF TAPE, SIDE 3]

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En route pour Nancy, France

Dusoulier

Phillips Company moved to the suburbs of Nancy, and they left a big place that we started to use for newcomers. Then, I was at Château du Montet; some people were in Vendoeuvre, in a building where we just rented some rooms; and others were in two places in Paris. In those days, my train left at 6:15 in the morning. Fortunately, they gave me a driver. The driver brought me to the station at six o’clock; at 6:15, I got the train. I arrived in Paris at 9:00 am. I had a driver taking me, and the driver was carrying me to the two centers, from center to center, mostly to CDST because of where we had the library. And at 6:15 pm, I was taking the train back. I arrived at about 10:30 pm to eleven o’clock three times a week.

Rayward

Sounds appalling.

Dusoulier

The rest of the time, I was in Nancy. I did that for three years. [laughter] I wasfortunate to have good health at that time. We started building the new building. I had tofollow the building project and, at the same time, continue to recruit, train, and movepeople.We moved the collections in six weeks, and we neverstopped serving the users. We managedthis because we had prepared the places of the collections by computer. During the day, we puteverythingin a truck andduring the nightwe moved.Then thenext day, the collections wereput in placeand we’d start all over again. We used two trucks a day.

There were machines left in CDST, and we bought new machines for INIST. As soon as the orders came, we filled them from INIST or CDST. They said it would be impossible. When I told Caroline Wiegandt-Sakoun, a librarian, she thought I was crazy.

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Not on a big collection; we have changed the places of collection in a library from Vienna. All the collection on drugs came to us, and we moved that from Vienna to Geneva.

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Recrutement du personnel

The people worked very hard. Even the people in CDST who were not going to stay did a marvelous job. We hired new people.

The first people we hired were the magasiniers (shopkeepers) to put things in place. Every night, there was a librarian staying with them to see that there were no particular questions about where to put things.

Rayward

Were you still doing the work on developing the database at this time?

Dusoulier

Yes. The new periodicals were arriving at Nancy, which meant the new people were working on them. The CDST was doing the backlog because some of the people were leaving, and some others didn’t want to work anymore because they were leaving—[gunshot]—midi (noon).

Rayward

There’s a gunshot at noon?

Dusoulier

Yes, every day at 12:00 pm. So that you can check your watch.

Rayward

The building site started when?

Dusoulier

It started in November, 1987.

Rayward

When you were recruiting the staff to set the service up—you had over three hundred people.

Dusoulier

Yes. More. We had three hundred fifty, plus the staff to do abstracts from home. Yes, some of the people were doing abstracts at home. Then we started doing them online from home also.

Rayward

What proportion of the abstracts was done outside by this piecework process? It was a piecework process, really, wasn’t it?

Dusoulier

Yes. Maybe half of the abstracts. But much less of the indexing was done that way.

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Rayward

The indexing was done in-house, essentially.

Dusoulier

Yes.

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Différences entre le Centre de Documentation Scientifique et Technique [CDST] et l'INIST

Rayward

Let’s talk a little about the changing philosophy and the approach represented in the INIST as opposed to the earlier CDST. Because so few of the staff actually transferred, it was actually a new organization.

Dusoulier

Yes. This was what we wanted. The most important change was that commercialization became an important part. We tried—and it is very difficult in an organization that is a public administration—to have a commercial department. We were not supposed to sell things. But we obtained permission from the Ministry of Finance to create a filiale (subsidiary company), the commercialization section.

Rayward

This is like a company that’s set up apart?

Dusoulier

Yes, a filiale is a part of the INIST group. In the INIST group we had INIST and INIST Diffusion. INIST Diffusion was in charge of commercialization. There were thirty or so employees. INIST had several directorates and one department of research. There was a directorate of production, development, external relations, administration and finance, and this filiale.

INIST Diffusion

Rayward

Was commercialization held at arm’s length?

Dusoulier

Yes. It was a part of the company but was separate. INIST Diffusion was in charge of the commercialization and promotion of the product. It had the exclusivity of promotion and commercialization of all the INIST products. They say it’s an interface to adapt the offer to the demand. They were also able to collect the money that we were not able to.

We were only able to spend money. It was a big budget, four hundred million francs a year. We had a big budget, but we had a controller. You can’t spend twenty cents without the controller’s approval about the way it was spent. The filiale was created in October, 1988.

Rayward

That was very close to the beginning.

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Dusoulier

On 15 March 1987, the institute was officially created. But the conception of it started earlier. In September, with the director general of CNRS, we decided to start. We started recruiting the personnel of INIST in December. In November 1989, we started the construction of the buildings. It was very fast construction. In November and December, wetransferred the collections. In January 1990, INIST Diffusion started to function officially. In fact, in January, 1990, we had started to charge the users through INIST Diffusion. Before, it was charged by us but the money was collected by CNRS.

Rayward

But, of course, now, those services are entirely digital. They’re online, or on CD-ROMs. Are they no longer printed?

Dusoulier

Printing was abandoned in 1992, I think it was.

Rayward

So, what were the reasons for deciding to no longer print? You mentioned escalating costs before.

Dusoulier

Yes. Also we wanted to move from a publication center to a new center, and we couldn’t do everything. We were selling CD-ROMs, profiles, and bibliographic searches.

We sold other formats because not all our users were able to use CD-ROMs at that time. CD- ROM use really started in the 1990s.

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Mutations technologiques

Rayward

You were ahead of your time in providing this sort of digital service.

Dusoulier

Yes. We were the first in Europe. It was very difficult to choose the technology. In fact, we didn’t choose very good technology because we started with big digital discs. This has not proved to be the best choice.

Rayward

I assume, though, that there’s a constant transfer of the technology.

Dusoulier

We change the technology all the time. The goal of Delacôte was to have a new technology center.

Rayward

What was the research department doing?

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Dusoulier

They did a lot of bibliometry, automatic indexing, statistics, and infométrie (infometry). It was very important for CNRS to know who was doing what. Of course, this analysis was a preliminary study for the assisted indexing system that they were working on.

We were working on a linguistic approach with a company called ALETH— segmentation techniques, optical character recognition—a preliminary study of an assisted indexing system evaluation and prospects. They were really a research department. Sometimes, we were a little bit unhappy that they were too research-oriented and not concentrating enough in applications. Then we remembered that we were CNRS, and we couldn’t kill research. [laughter]

Rayward

There was a development department.

Dusoulier

They were cognitive sciences. They were studying a lot of things that could help our staff to work better and do some research in cooperation with research institutes from Nancy that worked in linguistics and computers.

Rayward

Was some of what they were doing incorporated into the work of INIST?

Dusoulier

Yes. Automatic indexing, for example. Pieces of it were incorporated into the computer system. The computer system was quite sophisticated. We had fifty people working on it.

At one time, the department of development was one guy. [laughter] His goal was to steer the center to where the users wanted it. Honestly, he didn’t work very well. A few things came from it as far as knowing what the researchers wanted. But, you know, the researchers— they don’t even know what they want. You just ask them, “Do you want that?” They say, “Oh, yes, maybe.” Then you come and say, “This is what you asked for.” “Oh, no, that is not what I asked for.” “And what do you want?” Then, “I’m not sure.”

But, still, the development guy was not completely responsible. In fact, now, these users follow up, et cetera, is done in the marketing department.

Now, there is only one organization. INIST Diffusion is no longer a filiale . There is only one organization that has obtained, step by step, the right to commercialize. The problem was obtaining approval from the Ministry of Finance.

Rayward

So, just by way of general assessment as to where INIST has come from, where do you see it going? With this approach to commercialization, clearly there has to be, now, some notion of competitiveness with a whole range of other services.

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Because you’re in effect competing for the money of clients who have other options being offered by a whole slew of database providers in Europe, in the States, elsewhere. I’m curious as to where INIST fits.

Dusoulier

I have to say that, now, with the new director, who is a former administrator of one of the regions, they are coming back to CNRS users. For example, the international relations are much less international relations than they were when I was there. They are selling the services—but they are more centered to French researchers. We never had the idea of competing with other services.

Rayward

The minute you speak of commercialization, it implies a marketplace in which there is competition.

Dusoulier

Yes, but the goal was to be able to collect the money we were gaining—to collect and to spend for ourselves. It was not so much to collect more and more money.

Rayward

Not profit making.

Dusoulier

No. Our problem was that we were doing better services; we were selling more. All this money was going in a hole without end, which was called the Ministry of Finance. We never saw the results of our work. What we wanted—and what the CNRS has accepted—is, if we have more money, we can do better. We didn’t want to ask for more money, but we did want to do more services. That was the first goal. It was not so much to try to compete with Chemical Abstracts or whoever else. That was not the goal.

Don’t forget, it’s a public administration. There were philosophical problems with the British Library at the time. We sometimes thought that they were doing things that were not very polite or not very good.

Rayward

Yes, they were very commercially-oriented.

Dusoulier

But it was never at a personal level. We always had excellent relations with people like Brian Lang, David Russon, and Maurice Line. We tried even to have an agreement so that we abandoned the periodicals from which we sold very few articles. But, of course, competition was always in the air.

Being a public administration, our goal was not to compete with other public administrations. We wanted to be recognized at the European level as a partner. We succeeded in doing that. CDST was never recognized apart from Bulletin Signalétique.

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INIST was recognized, not only here, but we had visitors from China, Japan, and all over Europe. Big groups of people were coming to see what we were doing. But we never tried to say we were better than the English, Germans, or whoever.

Rayward

The British Library thing interested me because there’s no question that when the National Lending Library for Science and Technology was set up, they developed a very commercial outlook. They were interested in making money.

Dusoulier

Yes, I have visited them.

Rayward

And they do make millions of pounds. I was interested that you were saying that during the move to Nancy, there were four thousand copies of articles being copied a day at that time. Which is, again, the sort of thing that the British Library was, you know, seeing as—

Dusoulier

They were doing maybe ten thousand requests a day.

Rayward

—I wondered to what extent the development of their service actually impinged on yours.

Dusoulier

It didn’t. They were too expensive.

Rayward

Yours was oriented mostly towards people in France?

Dusoulier

For people in France and all over the world. Because we had periodicals that some people didn’t have. I don’t know where the users were coming from. Also, the British Library, at that time, was always very complicated with their coupons, et cetera. But, in fact, we established the same thing. Now, it’s easier with credit cards but, at one time, we couldn’t accommodate credit cards.

For two years almost, the center never stopped working. That was a burden. That was very difficult. I worked thirteen or fourteen hours a day.

Rayward

I can believe it.

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Dusoulier

But we were lucky. We were like pioneers. I had a group of people that didn’t count their time. It was really a good group of people. My deputy, in fact, was the latest director of CDSH. She became the chief of INIST human sciences. It worked very well because we had been working together for twenty-five years. She was a good friend of mine, and she played the game.

Rayward

The section concerned with the human sciences stayed in Paris?

Dusoulier

It stayed a little bit longer, and then they moved. Yes.

Rayward

So they’re all in Nancy now?

Dusoulier

Yes. Recruiting staff, continuing to work, and installing ourselves in a building of a new conception from Jean Nouvel is not so easy. Jean Nouvel is an architect with ideas— you have seen his futuristic buildings. It is not so easy to work in a futurist building. Have you seen the corridors in the library?

Rayward

Oh, yes. It looks fascinating, in terms of design, but I wonder what it would be like to work in it. What was in this area below?

Dusoulier

That was a computer service.

[END OF TAPE, SIDE 4]

[END OF INTERVIEW]

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Voir aussi

Notes

Notes de la rédaction