20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

300 Sirkka Havuof academic literature, mostly in the fields of theology, history and churchhistory. Philology and rhetoric were rather well represented, too. Thisdonation was crucial, now Turku University – had an excellent collectionof works in theology and humanities. The other sciences were, however,still quite modestly represented. 7After this generous gift the University received few donations, mostlydoubles from better equipped Swedish libraries. Queen Christina herselfdonated 87 works to the Academy. The literature the Queen donated dealtmainly with theology and history while the other sciences were poorlyrepresented.Biblioteca Academiae Aboensis was perpetually under-funded, itscollections did not grow in the direction the professors and students wouldhave hoped. The Academy’s Library had practically no books of modernsciences, and this was one of the reasons, why it was in Turku really difficultto follow the new trends in the development of science. However, at the endof the 18 th century the situation was getting slowly better, though there isno means to find out the size and contents of the Library during that period,since the whole Library with its catalogues were totally destroyed in a firein 1827. The fire that destroyed the whole town of Turku was also a turningpoint in the history of the University and its Library. The University movedfrom Turku to Helsinki, the new capital of Finland, and the University withits Library were now able to start a new and more prosperous era.The Functions of the National Library within the Biblioteca AcademiaeAboensis and Helsinki University LibraryOfficially the Academy’s Library was granted legal deposit rights in1707, and the Library began to obtain legal deposit copies of all the productsprinted in the whole kingdom of Sweden, which at that time included partsof the Baltic Countries and the Northern Germany. This right to the freedeposit copy was considered as a means to enrich the collections of theAcademy’s Library, not as a duty to preserve everything printed in thisarea or even in Finland. Accordingly it is quite understandable that thepreservation of the literature, considered unimportant for the research workat the University, was openly neglected.The idea of the real Finnish national library only began to takeshape in the late 18 th century as one of the manifestations of the nationalromanticism and the Academy’s Library started to assume the functionsof the real National Library. The Academy’s Librarian Henrik Gabriel7Vallinkoski: 111-112.