The stack room is one of the most important elements in the library. All the library’s publications are kept here and are distributed from here.
This department employs 20 librarians (depositary managers, couriers and bibliographers), out of which 17 are higher education graduates.
The stack room has two buildings, connected by a catwalk. Each building has 8 floors, each floor containing approximately 120.000 volumes. Overall, the stack room contains about two million volumes, the collections having been compiled through acquisitions, donations, internal and international loan or legal deposit. We own several important collections: general collection, legal deposit, Sibiu, Sion, Gaál Gábor collections and the periodicals collection.
The microclimate in the stack rooms is permanently monitored, in order to ensure the optimal conditions for conservation.
The main duties in the process of conservation are eliminating factors that are unfavourable for these collections, curing and tending to the deteriorations that occurred in time.
Duties of a conservator:
- Checking the environment quality of the rooms in which the publications are displayed/deposited by continuously monitoring the microclimatic parameter values;
- Studying and processing the registered results (diagrams);
- Applying the necessary solutions (dessication, humidification) when the environment parameters are outside the necessary values, in order to avoid the appearance of major imbalances and the appearance of microorganisms;
- Intervening when documents affected by microorganisms are found (indentifying the cause of the attack, indicating the means of repairing and scaling the documents, the room and the furniture);
- Training the librarians in the stack rooms, in the reading rooms and in the processing departments (in the main building and in the branch libraries) regarding document conservation (handling, depositing etc.);
- Organizing disinfection and pest control activities in the main building (when such action is needed);
- Guides and cleaning and aeration operations in the rooms in which documents are displayed or deposited, as well as in the pathways;
- Guides and participates (if needed) in all document cleaning and dusting activities.
