20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

928 DACOROMANICA – THE DOCUMENTATION ACTThe principles of the organisation and functioning of the libraryDACOROMANICA are:1. Exclusive preference to a single research engine in the access modeto the digitised collections is not given;2. Free access guarantee to the documents belonging to the publicdomain;3. The multi-lingual access to the collections with various and userfriendlyways of use;4. The creation of databases by the context and interrelation of thecollections;5. The underlying of the collections by interoperability, metadata,competent bibliographies and the information upon the sources;6. The guarantee of the completeness and authenticity of the digitisedcontents;7. The preservation of the digitised contents by means of competenthardware and software, and by protecting them against humanerror, external attacks, and super-pressure of the data.Initially, in December 1999, the offer proposed by DACOROMANICArepresented 6,500 pages digitised and converted in character recognitionsoftware (OCR), in HTML format. Next year, in 2000, the consulteddocuments amounted to more than 150,000 users, figures that by that timerepresented an indisputable success, if we take into consideration that theproject was under-financed.In the following years, 2001 and 2002, the project Dacoromanica, wastaken over by the Ministry of Culture and Cults, and was allotted an annualbudget of 1,500,000 euro. In fact, this project represented the extensionof the digital library of the Metropolitan Library of Bucharest, by thetransformation of the latter in a portal. This was thought in the beginning tobe based on a partnership between the Library of the Romanian Academy,the Metropolitan Library of Bucharest, the Central University Library, andthe National Library (the former Central State Library). The project wasblocked because the ongoing auctions were annulated at the end of the twofinancial years due to certain abusive and ill-intentioned contestations, withthe aim of hindering the project National Library of Romania to come intobeing. It was an utter premeditated sabotage.Overcoming the vicissitudes of that stagnation period, and impelledby the necessities of the digital era, which imposes the cooperation of thelibraries that are repositories of the national heritage, in December 2007it has been signed the most important and the only partnership in thewhole history of Romanian libraries, between the Metropolitan Library of