Bucarest, August 1999. Agoston Nemeth, our area distributor, announces that the University of Cluj, Romania has chosen ALEPH 500 to automate its central library and its eight faculty libraries. This is the seventh academic library in Romania to implement ALEPH.
The ĞLucian Blagağ Central University Library in Cluj- Napoca, is the largest in Transylvania, a region renowned for its deep forests, ski resorts and its Dracula legends. It was founded in 1872 and currently has a collection of over 3.5 million volumes with close to 500,000 volumes of bound periodicals. Together with its 27 branch libraries, it offers 55 reading rooms to over 55,000 registered patrons who transacted some 1.5 million requests in 1998. It is engaged in partnerships with over 1600 institutions in 73 countries, an activity which will be greatly facilitated by the modern Internet communication and search tools provided with the ALEPH system.
Behind these impressive statistics lies a large patrimony of bibliophile rarities donated over the years by private and institutional donors. Among these, most noteworthy to the cognoscenti, are the Nuremberg Codex Justinianus (1475), the Rudimentorum Cosmographicorum (1552), the Coresi Tetraevangelium (1561), the Piranesi art albums (18th century). Besides these jewels are large collections of reference works, special catalogs, microfilms, CDs, coins, musical scores etc.
With its faculties and libraries for mathematics, informatics, astronomy, chemistry, law, biology, geography, geology, letters, history, philosophy, psychology, history and theology, the Cluj university is one of the most intensive and variegated institutions of higher learning in the accelerating list of worldwide ALEPH users.
