Librarianship in French

The sixth entry is la politique documentaire, and the adjective on the end is the word an English reader will misread first. In English « documentary » has been captured almost entirely by one thing, the film: a documentary is shot, commissioned and broadcast, and the word is asked to do very little else. In French that noun exists too, un documentaire animalier, but the adjective never stopped working, and it means simply: having to do with documents, sources, records. So la recherche documentaire is searching the literature, le fonds documentaire is the stock a library holds, la veille documentaire is keeping watch on what gets published, and la politique documentaire is what English librarianship calls a collection development policy — the written decision about what is bought and, as the sentence on this page says, what is not. English kept the older adjective in two corners only, both of them formal: « documentary evidence » in a courtroom and « documentary credit » in a bank. Outside those two, rendering documentaire as « documentary » puts a camera crew in the stacks.