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The Strasbourg BNU was founded after a fire destroyed the former Protestant Seminary and Strasbourg city libraries during the war in 1870. The fire consumed 300,000 volumes and 3,500 manuscripts. The catastrophe caused immediate reactions everywhere and the German Empire and the rest of the world responded to the call for help with donations. In 1873, the Kaiserliche Universitäts und Landesbibliothek zu Strassburg with its 200,000 volumes was temporarily set up in the Rohan castle.
In 1889, a new building was being erected on the Kaiserplatz, next to the provincial Diet (Landesausschuss.) The architects of the Imperial Palace, August Hartel and Skojld Neckelmann were asked to design the building and decided to build a big central reading room under a dome surrounded by 8 levels of storage rooms.
After WWI and the return of Alsace-Lorraine to France, the question of the library's status came up, as it was both national and regional. In 1926, it became the Bibliothèque Nationale et Universitaire (National and University Library), a status unique to France. It is a government-owned organization and falls under the supervision of the Minister of Education and Fine Arts.
The WWII period was rather eventful for the BNU: it was evacuated and moved to the free zone at Clermont-Ferrand. In 1941, German officials and the Vichy government ordered the collections to be returned to Strasbourg.
On September 25, 1944, the north wing of the BNU was hit by a bomb, damaging the large reading room and the North storage rooms. In November of the same year, a part of the collections stored at the Barr town hall were burned due to combat fire.
The BNU was rebuilt and a major renovation was undertaken in the 1950s, financed by war retributions. Architect Francois Herrenschmidt modernized the space and removed the Neo-Greek and neo-classic features erected under the German period. He raised the reading room up two levels in order to gain storage area.
In the 1960s, two departments (Medicine, and Science and Technology) were moved from the central building on place of the Republic to the University campus. In 1976, the Library administration Office and the Alsatian and Law sections were transferred to rue Joffre, to two buildings that belonged to the Library. A tunnel was built between the Republic and Joffre buildings.
In 1992, the 3 common Universities of Strasbourg Centres of Documentation were created. The Library departments of Sciences, Medicine, and Pharmacy were transferred to the Louis Pasteur University SCD (Service Communs de la Documentation – Strasbourg Centres of Documentation).
The BNU has now united all its collections in one single place, administered as one single public service, one single and complete library. Now that the SCDs cater to local needs, the BNU has become a “generalist, encyclopaedic and research library" based on a long-term and systematic policy for expanding collections defined within the regional and national context of emerging electronic documentation. The BNU, a public organization with national status was placed under the supervision of the Minister in charge of Higher Education.
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