Colleagues from 31 Countries Help Romanians Gauge Needs

Hermina Anghelescu in front of the National Library of Romania, where she once worked.

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Some 200 library professionals gathered in Sinaia, Romania, September 20–23 for the fourth international symposium, “The Book. Romania. Europe.” organized by the Bucharest Metropolitan Library. Library professionals representing 31 nations—largely Francophone countries—delivered some 60 papers examining the state and future of librarianship in the French-speaking world, Romanian being a Romance language and French the lingua franca of the four-day gathering.

Hermina Anghelescu, associate professor of library and information science at Wayne State University in Detroit, organized the U.S. contingent, which presented at the conference and at two additional workshops in Braşov September 23 and Bucharest September 27. Anghelescu explained her ongoing involvement with the education and training of librarians in her native country: “Every year I return to Romania at least once, and I continue my work with Romanian colleagues in the library and information science field; I help as much as I can. We’ve been involved with a five-year project sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that brings computers to public libraries, and also training,” she said, noting that the need is great, since library education was discontinued during the communist regime and there is only one library school in the country.

In one track of the Sinaia program, “The Education, Training, and Continuous Development of Librarians and Information Specialists,” speakers focused on professional education and the major obstacles standing in its way. Anghelescu shared best practices and highlighted issues and trends in LIS education in the United States and Canada, explaining how job specialization works by type of service, type of library, and type of resources or collections. Some 70 Romanian librarians—school, academic, and public—attended the adjunct session in Braşov, and another 70 librarians attended the session at the National Pedagogical Library in Bucharest.

“Romanian libraries have made a lot of progress during the past 20 years, after the collapse of communism,” Anghelescu said, citing the penetration of the internet, computers, and the opening of the collections to the public. During the communist era, stacks were closed, censorship was in place, and books by Romanian authors who lived abroad were forbidden. Now such works are commonly available, she said, but “the training of librarians has lagged behind and that’s the purpose of my returning to Romania, to expose Romanian librarians who cannot travel abroad to more and more new ideas and practices.”

Representing the U.S. at the conference, in addition to Anghelescu, were: Irene Owens, dean and professor in the School of Library and Information Sciences at North Carolina Central University in Durham, on assessing the quality of library education; Marianne Hartzell, former executive director of the Michigan Library Association and now of Hartzell-Mika Consulting, on the value of library associations; Joseph Mika, formerly of Wayne State University and a partner in Hartzell-Mika Consulting, on accreditation; and Leonard Kniffel, representing the American Library Association, on American Libraries’ “12 Ways Libraries Are Good for the Country” and ALA’s public awareness and advocacy efforts through AtYourLibrary.org, ILoveLibraries.org, and the Campaign for the World’s Libraries. The American delegates’ programs were supported by the U.S. Embassy and the Metropolitan Library in Bucharest.

See video of Kniffel's interview with Anghelescu in Brasov.