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The capacity of storing existing materials and the ever rising editorial production is one of the contemporary challenges of academic and educational institutions. Also, the ability to disseminate structured content information using interoperability standards facilitates the discovery of resources. This fact is very important given the context of extreme abundance of information, specific to digital societies. In this article, we will present an initiative of the Research Institute for Quality of Life, Romanian Academy, which aims at digitalizing the relevant Romanian sociological publications. The context, the web platform architecture and the main indicators of the use of the available resources, as well as the development plans, will be discussed. Thus, through ensuring the free access to books and studies, the Virtual Library of Sociology contributes to the consolidation of the Romanian sociological community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital library is the most dynamic product of our time. The support this type of library is offering to higher education and scientific research is extremely important. This type of library solves one of the major problems of the contemporary society, fast access to information. The object of this article is to discuss the main services offered by the digital libraries and the role of digital repositories in higher education, as well as the vast diversity of digital materials beyond the printed documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within the framework of Manuscriptorim project, coordinated by the National Library of the Czech Republic, the National Library of Romania has joined in 2008 and started the program to digitize the most valuable collections of old books and manuscripts. As a result a large part of the collection of rare and old romanian books, the entire collection of incunabulae and more then 200 rare and old foreign books from the special collections department în Bucharest and 283 rare and old manuscripts from Batthyaneum branch of National Library from Alba Iulia were made accesible on the Manuscriptorium project site and on the National Digital Library on the National Library site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article represents the summary of the Ph.D. Thesis with the same title where the author presents and analyses the process of digitization of the cultural institutions' archives and the creation of the digital library, as a peak of knowledge in the new informational world. The thesis begins with theoretical approaches, with an emphasis on current research, following a general to specific reasoning. It is structured into two parts, as follows: the first one approaches the issue of digitization on a European level, by selectively presenting the definitions available in literature and providing some examples of projects from countries experienced in digitization; the second part presents the current context of the digitization in cultural institutions in Romania. In order to analyse the current situation of digitization and to identify the digitization projects in Romania, there was created a questionnaire, which was distributed electronically to 134 cultural institutions. The results of the questionnaire have generated a series of proposals regarding the improvement of the digitization process on a national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National Library of Romania is involved in various international projects aiming to create valuable digital content relevant to the European cultural memory. Since 2007, the library is connected in the following projects: TEL plus - set out to strengthen, extend and improve The European Library service by adding digital cultural and scientific/scholarly content and improving access to it, also to sustain Romanian and Bulgarian national libraries (two of the newest Member States) make their content available through The European Library and became full members of The European Library; ENRICH - European Networking Resources and Information concerning Cultural Heritage/ Manuscriptorium - project aimed to enhance access to digital image of old documents from different European cultural institutions and to build and deploy virtual research environment for the study of manuscripts, rare and old printed books; REDISCOVER - Reunion of Dispersed Content: Virtual Evaluation and Reconstruction - the main purpose of the project is to gather, virtually reconstruct and make accessible of medieval and renaissance collection dispersed during the late Middle Ages and early modern period, especially in period of Thirty year's war. The project activities take into account: selection according to a series of criteria, digitisation and integration of materials in a digital library performed on Manuscriptorium.com platform. National Library of Romania will further run two other international projects based on digitisation activities: Balkan Routes. Online digital collections - a project purposing to digitally available a French documentary corpus of rare and precious books from Balkan libraries; VERMANEL - Vernacular Manuscripts în European Libraries - a project with the aim to digitize and describe medieval German manuscripts of middle and eastern European provenance, that can be found in "Europeana" portal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]