V. A.

Urechia County Public Library Galati

V. A. Urechia County Public Library is one of the most important libraries in

the southeastern part of Romania.
The beginnings of the library can be traced back as early as 1889 when the
King Carol I signed a decree by which he accepted a donation of approximately 3,500
books, made by V.A. Urechia, a well-known Romanian scholar and member of the
Romanian Academy. The library was inaugurated in 1890 and since then has
undergone a lot of changes; starting as a traditional kind of library, is nowadays one of
the most modern libraries in Romania, deeply involved in changing its services
towards user proper benefits based on IT.
V. A. Urechia Public Library gives access to a wide range of library services,
such as: registration services, circulation department, reading documents in the
reading rooms, listening and watching of multimedia documents in multimedia room,
interlibrary loans, email references, bibliographies on request, access to the Internet
and legislation datebases, printing documents.
In 1991, the library received the first computer, which marked the first stage of
the library automatic information retrieval system; the next year, the first outlines of
the library automation program were sketched out. In the same year, the ISIS program
was installed.
In 1993, it began the building up of the fact database referring to Galati; this
database had brief information about public institutions, partnerships and local street
network. The network version of the ISIS program was also installed that year.
The first section of the computer network became operational in 1994; it
included 17 computer stations for library users, situated in the reading rooms. At that
time, the bibliographic database had information about books.
The second section of the computer network became operational next year and
non-books were added to the bibliographic database.
In 1996, more computers were added to the computer network.
In 1997, the TINLIB library program was purchased and installed. Next year,
the cataloguing and record units of TINLIB were already in use.
In the same time, the Opac program was fully used for library transactions.
 In 1999, the TINLIB bibliographic unit became operational and all the
bibliographic records were part of a computer based system. All the catalogue cards,
stock books, warning letters, minutes, forms and statistic reports were released by a
computer-based system.
In 2000, the library bought new equipment with an estimated value of 1 billion
lei and the library network had 110 computers; the Local Personalities file was made
in a computer-based system and 70 biographical cards were immediately released.
The library automation program was completed in 2002. From that moment
on, all the library transactions are carried out in a computer-based system.
Some the of the village public libraries from the county of Galati also took
part in this automation program; thus, the libraries from Tulucesti, Tudor
Vladimirescu, Tg. Bujor, Umbraresti and Liesti have all the benefits rising from the
use of a computer-based system.
V.A. Urechia County Public Library has had access to the Internet since 1999.
The first Internet connection was a TV wire one. Then, in 2000, high speed wires
were installed (100MB/s) and in 2002 a radio modem gave access to the Internet.