Historia Universitatis Iassiensis 6, 243–276
Abstract. The Romanian libraries went through a censorship process during Communism that mainly affected the intellectuals and academics. The public libraries, defined as “libraries which serve a public community such as a town or a county“, usually suffer from fewer censorship overtures because, traditionally, these communities are more liberal in their attitudes when it comes to intellectual freedom. The situation is changing in a totalitarian political system, such as Communism or Nazism. The dictators control everything, introducing the censorship everywhere. In Romania, it was a kind of inhibition of all levels, not just the official level. There was the self-censorship of the authors who conceived their books thinking of it all the time. Our research aims to analyze the libraries censorship process during the Communist regime which entailed the cultural institutions politicization.
The introduction of censorship and control over publications of the library determined the reorganization of special collections and some of them are preserved until today, in some cases. The library censorship subject has not been studied enough in Romania; we have few researches in this area and they are associated with related fields – philosophy or sociology. During our research project, we did the investigation potential funding sources found at National Archives and the libraries interne archives, we used mainly historical methods, we analyzed and compared the primary sources and the original documents, we did the corroboration of the questionnaires and structured interviews with previous information that will lead us to the proposed results. Working as a librarian in a large institution made us discovered that the Secret Fund Books of the Public Library “Gheorghe Asachi” Iasi is still in the same condition as it was during the communist regime because no one studied or worked with it. Doing this research, we hope that we can draw the authorities and the library management attention to the importance of these “forbidden” books, for study, research and entertainment. We think that the research can be possible with support and we hope that in short time the books will return to their purposes without being marked as special and kept in closed and special collections.
