The BIPULUM project aims to identify and study the public libraries existing in France in the 18th century, from the perspective of urban history, political history, and the history of cultural practices. It aims to understand how emerges, even before the Revolution, the idea of the library as a “public service”. In the kingdom, nearly fifty towns had a public library at the end of the 18th century, that is, libraries open to an undifferentiated public, without considering the legal status of the collection, which may depend on a city, an academy, an university or an ecclesiastical community. Led by Emmanuelle Chapron, professor of Early Modern History and professor of Book History at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the project is based on a partnership between the UMR 7303 Telemme (Aix Marseille University, CNRS), the UMR 5713 IHRIM (Lyon II, CNRS), the Centre Jean-Mabillon (École Nationale des Chartes) and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. By adopting an overall and comparative perspective, associating researchers, librarians, and archivists, we will try to understand the role of these institutions in the cultural and political evolutions in progress. We don’t claim to affirm that these institutions were key places of the Enlightenment (which they were probably not, or at least not all of them), but we make the hypothesis that they were part of crucial cultural changes, by establishing a public reading space in the heart of the city. Three aspects will be carefully considered: the moment of the foundation considered as a political project; the way in which a “public service” was developed and daily experienced, at a time when (if not the syntagm, as least) its idea was emerging; the identity of the public (traditionally overlooked in the history of libraries) and the uses they made of the collections. The project aims to produce an online instrument (with Heurist), enriched with new documents on the history of ancient libraries. Local, comparative, and global research will be collectively confronted and published. Valorisation and open science activities, developed in partnership with the libraries, will include exhibitions, video presentations of the project, visits and conferences. By taking advantage of the public's interest in the history of objects, places and collections and their heritage value, the project will connect researchers, professionals and users around a shared object, the public library.