Grant Harris

Studiile româneşti în lume în 2007 vol.1/Romanian Studies Around the World in 2007 vol.1 Studiile româneşti în lume în 2008 vol.2/Romanian Studies Around the World in 2008 vol.2	THE DAY PRINCE CANTEMIR SAVED ME: ROMANIANA AT THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS (Ziua în care Prinţul Cantemir m-a salvat. Romaniana la Biblioteca Congresului American) Grant Harris, Reference Specialist and Recommending Officer for Romanian materials, European Division, Library of Congress Rezumat `Biblioteca Congresului American din Washington, D.C. posedă cele mai extinse colecţii româneşti` `din afara teritoriului României. Sunt descrise aici câteva dintre comorile sale care au legătură cu` `România şi colecţiile sale în general, dar şi ce achiziţionează biblioteca şi prin ce mijloace, care sunt` `vizitatorii şi cercetătorii bibliotecii, precum şi colecţiile digitale aflate mereu în extindere.` *Prince Cantemir* It was in 1992 that I became intrigued by Romania. During the previous eight years at the Library of Congress, I had worked with French and Russian materials. Then, however, the Library was visited by Professor Doru Radosav, director of the Lucian Blaga Library at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj. Because Doru and I both know French, I was assigned to accompany him to meetings that week. I found Doru, a historian by training, to be intelligent, distinguished, and dedicated to learning all he could during his week with us. Moreover, he was enjoyable. Through that simple encounter, I became hooked on Romania. The next year, I volunteered to work with the Library’s Romanian materials and even traveled to Iaşi to give a paper at the Second International Congress on Romanian Studies. In the summer of 1994, I spent three delightful weeks in Cluj learning Romanian with other international students. Still, I had much to learn about the Library’s Romanian collections, which are probably the largest outside of Romania or Moldova. I should add that the Library’s collections of materials relating to nearly any country in the world are typically the largest outside of the country in question. Anyone wanting to know more about our Romanian collections may read about them at http://www.loc.gov/rr/european/coll/roman.html. I do not wish to repeat much of that description here. Rather, what I want to relate in this article are several events and activities concerning Romania that have occurred over the past 15 years at the Library of Congress. And I should begin with President Iliescu’s first visit. I had been told in early 1994 that President Iliescu might visit the Library of Congress. The months went by, and no one mentioned it again. To be truthful, I was glad not to have such an important visitor, for I had found little time to discover what treasures we might have. At any rate, I thought I would be given a few weeks’ notice before such an event … but that is not what happened. On a Thursday afternoon in September, I was informed that President Iliescu would arrive at the Library of Congress the following Monday evening. I was in a panic, wondering how I would find interesting items to show him in such a short time. I decided to look through the catalog of the Library’s Rare Book Reading Room, and I found several books by Prince Dimitrie Cantemir. Among them was The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire (London, 1734). Cantemir composed this history in Latin during the years 1714-16, while in exile as an advisor to Peter the Great. It was published only posthumously, first in English, after his son took the manuscript to London. It is the first substantial history of the Ottoman Empire in any European language, and it remained the preferred text for the next century. Not many years passed before it was published in French and German; the Library has copies of those translations as well. I showed the English version of this book to the president, along with other works by Cantemir. Among these was Hronicul Romano-Moldo-Vlahilor (Iaşi, 1835-1836). Composed during the last years of Cantemir's life, it remained in manuscript form for more than a century. Because he had sided with Peter the Great in 1711 in an unsuccessful attempt to repel the Ottoman presence, the work could not be published in Romanian territories until the Turkish stronghold had weakened. It is Cantemir's history of the Moldovans, Wallachians, and Transylvanians, stressing their common Latin origins. I said to President Iliescu that Cantemir reminded me of Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president (1801-09). Both Cantemir and Jefferson were well educated and multilingual, were government leaders in turbulent times, writers of enduring importance, and had other talents in common – Cantemir composed music and Jefferson played the violin, for example. Over the months that followed that September evening, however, I kept thinking of Jefferson and Cantemir, and I wished that they had lived at the same time. Jefferson, I knew, had carried on a correspondence with many of his European contemporaries, and Cantemir could have been one of them had he lived nearly a century later. It finally occurred to me to check Jefferson’s personal library to see if he had owned any of Cantemir’s works. After the British destroyed the U.S. Capitol and its library in 1814, Jefferson offered to re-establish the Library of Congress by selling his personal book collection, which contained materials about many disciplines in the humanities, arts and sciences. This offer was accepted, and it is responsible for setting a precedent for the Library’s current mission of collecting materials on all subjects rather than merely parliamentary matters of law, government, and politics. I was able to consult a bibliography listing the 6,487 volumes of Jefferson’s original collection, which was recognized as one of the finest private libraries in the United States. There I found that Jefferson had acquired a copy of volume 1 of the two-volume Histoire de l'Empire Othoman... (Paris, 1743) by Cantemir – this was the French translation of the work I mentioned earlier. The French volume, alas, was among the many books from the original Jefferson Collection that were destroyed in a calamitous fire in the Capitol on Christmas Eve, 1851. Subsequently the Library replaced the title, purchasing both volumes of the French edition. What is important, however, is that Jefferson had almost certainly read volume 1 of the French edition, and, in this way, Jefferson knew Cantemir. Jefferson possibly acquired the volume when he served in Paris as the U.S. Minister to France from 1785 to 1789. I have always felt grateful to Cantemir for putting in front of me such treasures when I needed them, and that Jefferson himself had learned from Cantemir. Finding these great works put me at ease, and I went on to find other books of great interest. Just before becoming president in 1989, Ion Iliescu had served five years as director of Editura Tehnică. The Library has more than 1,400 books published by Editura Tehnică, and I was able to assemble about a dozen of that publisher’s books that appeared during Iliescu’s directorship. Iliescu clearly enjoyed seeing these books; they were old friends. I picked up one title, Morfologia şi dinamica albiilor de rîuri, and opened it to the preface, which I knew he had written. Iliescu took the book from me and turned the page with his name on it toward the two Romanian televisions cameras in attendance, and joked, “Look, I’m famous,” which caused the cameramen and all of us to laugh. Iliescu then turned back to the Editura Tehnică volumes and pulled out a fat book numbering 1,360 pages and entitled Dicţionar tehnic maghiar-român. This work, he said, was one that he had to fight for in order to have it published. It was politically incorrect, and yet so necessary. He was clearly proud of his success in getting it printed, and rightly so. We showed Iliescu several other items that day, and again in October 2003 when he returned to the Library during his second presidency. Among them was the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to President Woodrow Wilson for leading negotiations at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Another was Magazin istoric pentru Dacia, of which the Library has volumes 2 through 5, published 1846-7. The early volumes of this periodical are printed primarily in the traditional Cyrillic alphabet that had been used for centuries in writing and printing the Romanian language. The later volumes, however, gradually replaced the Cyrillic letters with Roman ones. This is a good example of the transition alphabets that culminated in an official Latin alphabet in 1859. *Collections* Besides books, periodicals, and newspapers, the Library possesses rich special collections of maps, manuscripts, music, photographs, and other materials. For example, the Geography and Map Reading Room maintains the world’s largest collection of cartographic materials available to the public, among which are thousands of maps of Romania. The Music Division maintains excellent resources on Romanian music, both printed music and sound recordings. One treasure of particular note is George Enescu’s original, signed holograph score of his Piano Quartet No. 2 in D minor, Op. 30. This work, in fact, had its world premiere in the Library's Coolidge Auditorium on October 31, 1947. Enescu corresponded on numerous occasions with Harold Spivacke, then Chief of the Music Division. Another treasure is housed in the American Folklife Center – the Gheorghe and Eugenia Popescu-Judetz Collection, which focuses on folk song and dance. These manuscripts, audio recordings, graphic materials, and moving images span the years 1938-74, and include several thousand notated folk dance variants, more than 3,200 recorded melodies, and approximately 4,000 notated dance melodies, from all regions of Romania. The Library also maintains the Archive of World Literature on Tape, whereby writers are recorded in the Library's studios reading from their works. The Archive includes readings by poets Caius Traian Dragomir and Ioana Ieronim, novelist Augustin Buzura, and critic Nicolae Manolescu. The Library is fortunate to include the United States Copyright Office, which facilitates the acquisition of American imprints. About two-thirds of the Library’s collections come from foreign countries, however, and these are more difficult to acquire. The Library strives to collect any foreign work that shows original research, and thus excludes nearly all textbooks. Because the United States has a National Library of Medicine and a National Library of Agriculture, those two repositories collect most heavily in clinical medicine and agriculture, respectively. Otherwise, the Library of Congress collects in nearly all subjects, including belles lettres. Libraries acquire books by purchase, by exchange, and by donations; the Library of Congress employs all three of these methods. In each country, the Library chooses to work with a book vendor who knows the country’s book trade, as is the case with Romania. The Library provides to the vendor a long description of our acquisitions profile, explaining the kinds of books that the vendor should automatically send to the Library, and asking the vendor to provide bibliographic information on other works that the vendor believes might be of interest. As the Romanian recommending officer, it is my responsibility to choose additional items from the vendor and to provide feedback to the vendor. The Library also has book exchanges with the Romanian Academy, several universities, and other institutions. Our acquisition of materials by purchase and by exchange works relatively well, but it is never perfect – it is difficult to track every publishing house in any country. That is why we very much appreciate donations. Interested donors should first send me an email at grha@loc.gov, listing for each book its author, title, city of publication, publishing house, year of publication, and last numbered page. *Who Uses the Library of Congress?* Anyone aged 18 or above may use the reading rooms and resources of the Library of Congress. Many who do so are students at the undergraduate or graduate level, doctoral candidates, and professors. Those who use the Romanian collections include Americans as well as Romanians and Moldovans. Other users are Romanian Embassy staff and former broadcasters from the Romanian branch of Voice of America, to give two examples. The Library’s website offers an AskaLibrarian service at http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ that allows remote users to pose questions via the Internet. Readers can also send an email inquiry directly to the European Reading Room at eurref@loc.gov, or, if the question concerns Moldova or Romania, they may email me directly (in English or in Romanian) at grha@loc.gov. The Library’s most important user is the United States Congress. Occasionally I assist in answering Congressional inquiries, but there is also a part of the Library called the Congressional Research Service (CRS) that answers only to Congress. CRS periodically provides Congress with updates on current events in each country, including Moldova and Romania. In addition to those who use the Library for research, there are others who come primarily for visits or orientations. I have shown treasures to foreign ministers and embassy staff from Moldova and Romania, and to other government officials from those two countries. Radu, Prince of Hohenzollern-Veringen has also been among our visitors. The U.S. Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats for service abroad, regularly sends me diplomats in training for service in Moldova or Romania so that I may show them Romanian cultural treasures and instruct them on library resources. The American Romanian Academy held a conference at the Library in 1998, and I have coordinated occasional lectures at the Library concerning Moldova and Romania. Several Moldovan and Romanian scholars and librarians have had Fulbright and other fellowships centered at the Library of Congress. *Online Resources* With the growth of the Internet, fewer researchers arrive at the doors of the Library of Congress than in the past. The Library has been quick to understand some of the challenges and opportunities of the Internet, and has thus made more and more content available in a digital format. In the mid 1990s, the Library set out to digitize 5 million items by the year 2000 and reached its goal. Most of these materials came from special collections, such as maps, drawings, photographs, manuscripts, and sound recordings. The Library’s expanding digital collections and policies are described at http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html. It is primarily materials relating to Americana that have been digitized, but foreign materials are also present. The Prints & Photographs Online Catalog at http://memory.loc.gov/pp/pphome.html, for instance, includes over 200 digital images that can be found by searching on the word “Romania.” The Library subscribes to many commercially available electronic resources, especially newspapers and periodicals, which we can make available only in our readings rooms. A description of these commercial resources, as well as of some important freely available web resources, is available at http://www.loc.gov/rr/ElectronicResources/. At that website, descriptions of commercial resources are accompanied by an image of a lock, signifying that these resources can only be accessed from the reading rooms. The other sites are freely available from anywhere. One free resource is a set of country study handbooks produced in the 1980s/early 1990s by the Library’s Federal Research Division at the request of the U.S. Department of Defense. These handbooks are available at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/. By coincidence, the research for that handbook was completed in 1989. Funding from the Department of Defense essentially ended in the early 1990s, so that second editions have not been produced. However, the Federal Research Division does provide updated country profiles for most countries, including Romania, available at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles.html. The country study handbooks, by the way, were placed on the Internet in 1996-7; I believe that would make the Romanian country study the first electronic book about Romania to appear on the Internet. The European Reading Room provides an expanding set of online resources at URL http://www.loc.gov/rr/european/. Descriptions of the Library’s collections for each country can be found there under “Overviews by Country.” I mentioned earlier the description of the Library’s Romanian collections – it can be found at this website, as well as a description of the Moldovan collections. The European Reading Room website also provides “Portals to the World: Europe,” which describes and has links to the most informative websites from around the world about each country of Europe. The Library of Congress began systematically collecting residential and organizational telephone directories from many countries in 1937, but the records for these items, in general, are not included in the Library's online catalog. To fill that gap, the European Reading Room’s webpage provides, under the heading “Telephone Directories,” indexes that detail the Library's specific holdings of these directories from each of the countries listed. In addition, the Library has earlier address (non-telephone) directories and business directories that are reflected in the online catalog – only a few of them are included in these indexes. Historians, biographers and genealogists greatly value older directories, as such resources tell where a person lived and what years he or she resided there. The Library’s Romanian and Moldovan directories are listed. Moreover, the Library has digitized Anuarul "Socec" al României-Mari. This historic, two-volume address book for organizations and businesses throughout Romania was compiled around 1922-23 and stands as the most complete survey of Greater Romania during the interwar period. The Library’s digitized version is not searchable by itself, but an outside source, Search Engine for Online Historical Directories (http://kalter.org/search/), provides a way to search the Socec directory, which it calls "Romanian Business and Organizational Directory, volumes I/II”. The Library now requires that we obtain approval from the original producer (or successor agency) of a directory before we can digitize it for public display on the Internet; I have obtained such approvals for about ten Romanian telephone directories from 1937 to 1970, and these should be digitized in 2008-9. In August 2007 the Library entered into an agreement for a joint project to preserve fragile but important websites in Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine. Such websites may be governmental or non-governmental (including the opposition’s sites), but risk disappearing from the World Wide Web for any of a number of reasons. Funding for this project is provided by the Library of Congress, which allows professors and graduate students at Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.) to search for such websites and archive them using tools and storage space provided by the Internet Archive in California. The Internet Archive seeks to archive as much as possible of the World Wide Web. * * * * * What I have attempted to offer here is a tour of the Library of Congress as it applies to Romania, including several of my favorite treasures, our collections in general, how and what we acquire, visitors and researchers, and our expanding digital resources. I welcome correspondence, so please do not hesitate to contact me at grha@loc.gov.


Studiile româneşti în lume în 2007 vol.1/Romanian Studies Around the World in 2007 vol.1

THE DAY PRINCE CANTEMIR SAVED ME: ROMANIANA AT
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
(Ziua în care Prinţul Cantemir m-a salvat. Romaniana la Biblioteca Congresului American)

Grant Harris, Reference Specialist and
Recommending Officer for Romanian materials,
European Division, Library of Congress

Rezumat

Biblioteca Congresului American din Washington, D.C. posedă cele mai extinse colecţii româneşti

din afara teritoriului României. Sunt descrise aici câteva dintre comorile sale care au legătură cu

România şi colecţiile sale în general, dar şi ce achiziţionează biblioteca şi prin ce mijloace, care sunt

vizitatorii şi cercetătorii bibliotecii, precum şi colecţiile digitale aflate mereu în extindere.

Prince Cantemir

It was in 1992 that I became intrigued by Romania. During the previous eight years at the Library of Congress, I had worked with French and Russian materials. Then, however, the Library was visited by Professor Doru Radosav, director of the Lucian Blaga Library at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj. Because Doru and I both know French, I was assigned to accompany him to meetings that week. I found Doru, a historian by training, to be intelligent, distinguished, and dedicated to learning all he could during his week with us. Moreover, he was enjoyable. Through that simple encounter, I became hooked on Romania.

The next year, I volunteered to work with the Library’s Romanian materials and even traveled to Iaşi to give a paper at the Second International Congress on Romanian Studies. In the summer of 1994, I spent three delightful weeks in Cluj learning Romanian with other international students. Still, I had much to learn about the Library’s Romanian collections, which are probably the largest outside of Romania or Moldova. I should add that the Library’s collections of materials relating to nearly any country in the world are typically the largest outside of the country in question. Anyone wanting to know more about our Romanian collections may read about them at http://www.loc.gov/rr/european/coll/roman.html. I do not wish to repeat much of that description here. Rather, what I want to relate in this article are several events and activities concerning Romania that have occurred over the past 15 years at the Library of Congress. And I should begin with President Iliescu’s first visit.

I had been told in early 1994 that President Iliescu might visit the Library of Congress. The months went by, and no one mentioned it again. To be truthful, I was glad not to have such an important visitor, for I had found little time to discover what treasures we might have. At any rate, I thought I would be given a few weeks’ notice before such an event … but that is not what happened.

On a Thursday afternoon in September, I was informed that President Iliescu would arrive at the Library of Congress the following Monday evening. I was in a panic, wondering how I would find interesting items to show him in such a short time. I decided to look through the catalog of the Library’s Rare Book Reading Room, and I found several books by Prince Dimitrie Cantemir. Among them was The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire (London, 1734). Cantemir composed this history in Latin during the years 1714-16, while in exile as an advisor to Peter the Great. It was published only posthumously, first in English, after his son took the manuscript to London. It is the first substantial history of the Ottoman Empire in any European language, and it remained the preferred text for the next century. Not many years passed before it was published in French and German; the Library has copies of those translations as well.

I showed the English version of this book to the president, along with other works by Cantemir. Among these was Hronicul Romano-Moldo-Vlahilor (Iaşi, 1835-1836). Composed during the last years of Cantemir's life, it remained in manuscript form for more than a century. Because he had sided with Peter the Great in 1711 in an unsuccessful attempt to repel the Ottoman presence, the work could not be published in Romanian territories until the Turkish stronghold had weakened. It is Cantemir's history of the Moldovans, Wallachians, and Transylvanians, stressing their common Latin origins.

I said to President Iliescu that Cantemir reminded me of Thomas Jefferson, the third U.S. president (1801-09). Both Cantemir and Jefferson were well educated and multilingual, were government leaders in turbulent times, writers of enduring importance, and had other talents in common – Cantemir composed music and Jefferson played the violin, for example.

Over the months that followed that September evening, however, I kept thinking of Jefferson and Cantemir, and I wished that they had lived at the same time. Jefferson, I knew, had carried on a correspondence with many of his European contemporaries, and Cantemir could have been one of them had he lived nearly a century later. It finally occurred to me to check Jefferson’s personal library to see if he had owned any of Cantemir’s works. After the British destroyed the U.S. Capitol and its library in 1814, Jefferson offered to re-establish the Library of Congress by selling his personal book collection, which contained materials about many disciplines in the humanities, arts and sciences. This offer was accepted, and it is responsible for setting a precedent for the Library’s current mission of collecting materials on all subjects rather than merely parliamentary matters of law, government, and politics. I was able to consult a bibliography listing the 6,487 volumes of Jefferson’s original collection, which was recognized as one of the finest private libraries in the United States. There I found that Jefferson had acquired a copy of volume 1 of the two-volume Histoire de l'Empire Othoman... (Paris, 1743) by Cantemir – this was the French translation of the work I mentioned earlier. The French volume, alas, was among the many books from the original Jefferson Collection that were destroyed in a calamitous fire in the Capitol on Christmas Eve, 1851. Subsequently the Library replaced the title, purchasing both volumes of the French edition. What is important, however, is that Jefferson had almost certainly read volume 1 of the French edition, and, in this way, Jefferson knew Cantemir. Jefferson possibly acquired the volume when he served in Paris as the U.S. Minister to France from 1785 to 1789.

I have always felt grateful to Cantemir for putting in front of me such treasures when I needed them, and that Jefferson himself had learned from Cantemir. Finding these great works put me at ease, and I went on to find other books of great interest.

Just before becoming president in 1989, Ion Iliescu had served five years as director of Editura Tehnică. The Library has more than 1,400 books published by Editura Tehnică, and I was able to assemble about a dozen of that publisher’s books that appeared during Iliescu’s directorship. Iliescu clearly enjoyed seeing these books; they were old friends. I picked up one title, Morfologia şi dinamica albiilor de rîuri, and opened it to the preface, which I knew he had written. Iliescu took the book from me and turned the page with his name on it toward the two Romanian televisions cameras in attendance, and joked, “Look, I’m famous,” which caused the cameramen and all of us to laugh.

Iliescu then turned back to the Editura Tehnică volumes and pulled out a fat book numbering 1,360 pages and entitled Dicţionar tehnic maghiar-român. This work, he said, was one that he had to fight for in order to have it published. It was politically incorrect, and yet so necessary. He was clearly proud of his success in getting it printed, and rightly so.

We showed Iliescu several other items that day, and again in October 2003 when he returned to the Library during his second presidency. Among them was the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to President Woodrow Wilson for leading negotiations at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. Another was Magazin istoric pentru Dacia, of which the Library has volumes 2 through 5, published 1846-7. The early volumes of this periodical are printed primarily in the traditional Cyrillic alphabet that had been used for centuries in writing and printing the Romanian language. The later volumes, however, gradually replaced the Cyrillic letters with Roman ones. This is a good example of the transition alphabets that culminated in an official Latin alphabet in 1859.

Collections

Besides books, periodicals, and newspapers, the Library possesses rich special collections of maps, manuscripts, music, photographs, and other materials. For example, the Geography and Map Reading Room maintains the world’s largest collection of cartographic materials available to the public, among which are thousands of maps of Romania. The Music Division maintains excellent resources on Romanian music, both printed music and sound recordings. One treasure of particular note is George Enescu’s original, signed holograph score of his Piano Quartet No. 2 in D minor, Op. 30. This work, in fact, had its world premiere in the Library's Coolidge Auditorium on October 31, 1947. Enescu corresponded on numerous occasions with Harold Spivacke, then Chief of the Music Division. Another treasure is housed in the American Folklife Center – the Gheorghe and Eugenia Popescu-Judetz Collection, which focuses on folk song and dance. These manuscripts, audio recordings, graphic materials, and moving images span the years 1938-74, and include several thousand notated folk dance variants, more than 3,200 recorded melodies, and approximately 4,000 notated dance melodies, from all regions of Romania. The Library also maintains the Archive of World Literature on Tape, whereby writers are recorded in the Library's studios reading from their works. The Archive includes readings by poets Caius Traian Dragomir and Ioana Ieronim, novelist Augustin Buzura, and critic Nicolae Manolescu.

The Library is fortunate to include the United States Copyright Office, which facilitates the acquisition of American imprints. About two-thirds of the Library’s collections come from foreign countries, however, and these are more difficult to acquire. The Library strives to collect any foreign work that shows original research, and thus excludes nearly all textbooks. Because the United States has a National Library of Medicine and a National Library of Agriculture, those two repositories collect most heavily in clinical medicine and agriculture, respectively. Otherwise, the Library of Congress collects in nearly all subjects, including belles lettres. Libraries acquire books by purchase, by exchange, and by donations; the Library of Congress employs all three of these methods. In each country, the Library chooses to work with a book vendor who knows the country’s book trade, as is the case with Romania. The Library provides to the vendor a long description of our acquisitions profile, explaining the kinds of books that the vendor should automatically send to the Library, and asking the vendor to provide bibliographic information on other works that the vendor believes might be of interest. As the Romanian recommending officer, it is my responsibility to choose additional items from the vendor and to provide feedback to the vendor. The Library also has book exchanges with the Romanian Academy, several universities, and other institutions.

Our acquisition of materials by purchase and by exchange works relatively well, but it is never perfect – it is difficult to track every publishing house in any country. That is why we very much appreciate donations. Interested donors should first send me an email at grha@loc.gov, listing for each book its author, title, city of publication, publishing house, year of publication, and last numbered page.

Who Uses the Library of Congress?

Anyone aged 18 or above may use the reading rooms and resources of the Library of Congress. Many who do so are students at the undergraduate or graduate level, doctoral candidates, and professors. Those who use the Romanian collections include Americans as well as Romanians and Moldovans. Other users are Romanian Embassy staff and former broadcasters from the Romanian branch of Voice of America, to give two examples. The Library’s website offers an AskaLibrarian service at http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ that allows remote users to pose questions via the Internet. Readers can also send an email inquiry directly to the European Reading Room at eurref@loc.gov, or, if the question concerns Moldova or Romania, they may email me directly (in English or in Romanian) at grha@loc.gov.

The Library’s most important user is the United States Congress. Occasionally I assist in answering Congressional inquiries, but there is also a part of the Library called the Congressional Research Service (CRS) that answers only to Congress. CRS periodically provides Congress with updates on current events in each country, including Moldova and Romania.

In addition to those who use the Library for research, there are others who come primarily for visits or orientations. I have shown treasures to foreign ministers and embassy staff from Moldova and Romania, and to other government officials from those two countries. Radu, Prince of Hohenzollern-Veringen has also been among our visitors.

The U.S. Foreign Service Institute, which trains American diplomats for service abroad, regularly sends me diplomats in training for service in Moldova or Romania so that I may show them Romanian cultural treasures and instruct them on library resources. The American Romanian Academy held a conference at the Library in 1998, and I have coordinated occasional lectures at the Library concerning Moldova and Romania. Several Moldovan and Romanian scholars and librarians have had Fulbright and other fellowships centered at the Library of Congress.

Online Resources

With the growth of the Internet, fewer researchers arrive at the doors of the Library of Congress than in the past. The Library has been quick to understand some of the challenges and opportunities of the Internet, and has thus made more and more content available in a digital format. In the mid 1990s, the Library set out to digitize 5 million items by the year 2000 and reached its goal. Most of these materials came from special collections, such as maps, drawings, photographs, manuscripts, and sound recordings. The Library’s expanding digital collections and policies are described at http://www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html. It is primarily materials relating to Americana that have been digitized, but foreign materials are also present. The Prints & Photographs Online Catalog at http://memory.loc.gov/pp/pphome.html, for instance, includes over 200 digital images that can be found by searching on the word “Romania.”

The Library subscribes to many commercially available electronic resources, especially newspapers and periodicals, which we can make available only in our readings rooms. A description of these commercial resources, as well as of some important freely available web resources, is available at http://www.loc.gov/rr/ElectronicResources/. At that website, descriptions of commercial resources are accompanied by an image of a lock, signifying that these resources can only be accessed from the reading rooms. The other sites are freely available from anywhere.

One free resource is a set of country study handbooks produced in the 1980s/early 1990s by the Library’s Federal Research Division at the request of the U.S. Department of Defense. These handbooks are available at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/. By coincidence, the research for that handbook was completed in 1989. Funding from the Department of Defense essentially ended in the early 1990s, so that second editions have not been produced. However, the Federal Research Division does provide updated country profiles for most countries, including Romania, available at http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/profiles.html. The country study handbooks, by the way, were placed on the Internet in 1996-7; I believe that would make the Romanian country study the first electronic book about Romania to appear on the Internet.

The European Reading Room provides an expanding set of online resources at URL http://www.loc.gov/rr/european/. Descriptions of the Library’s collections for each country can be found there under “Overviews by Country.” I mentioned earlier the description of the Library’s Romanian collections – it can be found at this website, as well as a description of the Moldovan collections. The European Reading Room website also provides “Portals to the World: Europe,” which describes and has links to the most informative websites from around the world about each country of Europe.

The Library of Congress began systematically collecting residential and organizational telephone directories from many countries in 1937, but the records for these items, in general, are not included in the Library's online catalog. To fill that gap, the European Reading Room’s webpage provides, under the heading “Telephone Directories,” indexes that detail the Library's specific holdings of these directories from each of the countries listed. In addition, the Library has earlier address (non-telephone) directories and business directories that are reflected in the online catalog – only a few of them are included in these indexes. Historians, biographers and genealogists greatly value older directories, as such resources tell where a person lived and what years he or she resided there. The Library’s Romanian and Moldovan directories are listed. Moreover, the Library has digitized Anuarul "Socec" al României-Mari. This historic, two-volume address book for organizations and businesses throughout Romania was compiled around 1922-23 and stands as the most complete survey of Greater Romania during the interwar period. The Library’s digitized version is not searchable by itself, but an outside source, Search Engine for Online Historical Directories (http://kalter.org/search/), provides a way to search the Socec directory, which it calls "Romanian Business and Organizational Directory, volumes I/II”. The Library now requires that we obtain approval from the original producer (or successor agency) of a directory before we can digitize it for public display on the Internet; I have obtained such approvals for about ten Romanian telephone directories from 1937 to 1970, and these should be digitized in 2008-9.

In August 2007 the Library entered into an agreement for a joint project to preserve fragile but important websites in Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine. Such websites may be governmental or non-governmental (including the opposition’s sites), but risk disappearing from the World Wide Web for any of a number of reasons. Funding for this project is provided by the Library of Congress, which allows professors and graduate students at Georgetown University (Washington, D.C.) to search for such websites and archive them using tools and storage space provided by the Internet Archive in California. The Internet Archive seeks to archive as much as possible of the World Wide Web.

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What I have attempted to offer here is a tour of the Library of Congress as it applies to Romania, including several of my favorite treasures, our collections in general, how and what we acquire, visitors and researchers, and our expanding digital resources. I welcome correspondence, so please do not hesitate to contact me at grha@loc.gov.

CENTRUL DE CERCETARE ŞTIINŢIFICĂ "INTERFERENŢE CULTURALE"