Studiul umanioarelor la Universitatea din Iași și constituirea bibliotecilor specializate
Humanities at the University of Iași and the Foundation of Specialized Libraries

Summary/Abstract: The present research aims to open a debate on how the libraries of the University of Iaşi fulfilled the requirements of humanistic knowledge. Immediately after the foundation of the first Romanian modern institution of higher education, the organization of a library became vital necessity, and the solution was to transfer the old Library of the Princely Academy in the new location. It acquired the status of Central Library under the regulation of 1864 and was open for all categories of readers. After the building of the University Palace in Copou, in the autumn of 1897, the Central Library was also moved here. Although this new location revealed an academic appearance due to its special architecture, its limitations were obvious from the beginning. The main problems were generated by the fact that the area where more than 70,000 books should have been stored was relatively small and the staff was insufficient and poorly paid. There added some difficulties in organization, as the administrative activities took place in the reading room, where most of the papers were stored. Moreover, the Library was not part of the University’s administration, a fact that hindered students’ access to books. The need for a reorganization of the Central Library was frequently brought into question in early 20th century by personalities who shaped the destiny of the institution, such as Giorge Pascu and Dimitrie Gusti. Only half a century later, in 1914, the name of “University Library” achieved accreditation, as a result of an initiative of the Library Commission, sanctioned by the “Regulation of the Library of the University of Iaşi”, approved by royal decree in 1916. The problems the Library was facing also reflected in the dynamics of various types of readers, and that is the reason for which the present approach analyses the quantitative and qualitative evolution of the readers. Besides the University Library, each faculty, department, seminar and laboratory had its own specialized library. The volumes of these libraries were purchased from funds allocated to departments for maintenance, by donations of authors and professors and by international exchanges. By 1910 the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters did not have a unitary library, as each seminar held its own book fund, although, because of lack of space, most volumes were crowded in one single room. In the spring of 1910, the Faculty finally received a location for the seminars of its various departments and the libraries of seminars. The foundation of seminars’ libraries did not resolve the issue of the access of students in Humanities to essential works. One problem was the libraries’ poor organization and the lack of essential volumes. There added the lack of collection of sources, which primarily affected the students specialized in studying the past, who needed facilities to conduct their research in the capital. In 1920 the books’ fund of the libraries of the 15 seminars within the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters was of 8,000 volumes, but the conditions to be read did not prove to be the best, as the reading rooms also hosted the meetings of the seminars. One may conclude that, despite the individual efforts of many professors to purchase books, the University’s infrastructure for their storage and reading remained poor during the period covered by the present research.

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