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The Story

For years, this small and mysterious university building, functioning as a teaching location (which oftentimes takes freshmen forever to find, despite its proximity to the main university building), has also been "housing" a growing collection of thousands of academic books. To many past and present generations of English majors or minors, the Reading Room is a little bit like one of those hybrid mythical figures: part-classroom and part- (improvised) library. In-between or even during the courses and lectures held there, the Shakespeares, the Chaucers, the Hemingways, the Whitmans, the Thoreaus or the Miltons peer at you from their shelves, behind the safely locked glass windows.

In 2014, members of the English departmentat Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, together with a team of enthusiastic students, undertook the first daunting task of re-organizing the library. With the help of IT-savvy friends, we created an online searchable catalog and a library management system and started the painstaking process of rescuing each book from the dust and the spider webs, assigning it an inventory number and registering it into the system. We also started to include the books held at the English Department. Because of the sheer size of all the collections, the process of registering all books, of saving them from a life of quasi-obscurity is not complete yet. But we are slowly and surely getting there.

In 2017, with the help of the University and the United States Embassy In Bucharest, the Reading Room was renovated and refurbished and it now also proudly hosts a plethora of extracurricular activities from book clubs and tutoring groups to various cultural and educational events.