All over the world, on April 23, Librarian’s Day and World Book Day are celebrated, at the initiative of UNESCO, since 1996.
On this day, in almost all countries of the world, there are actions to pay tribute to the book, authors, publishers, booksellers, librarians and, implicitly, readers.
The idea of marking Librarian’s Day and World Book Day on April 23 was offered by Spain, where the Rose Festival takes place on this day, an event celebrating Saint George (San Jordi) and commemorating Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare. On this day in Spain, since the Middle Ages, girls and women receive flowers, and men receive cards.
In Romania since 2005, April 23 was declared “Romanian Librarian’s Day”, and on June 23, 2014, the then President of Romania signed the decree for the promulgation of the Law regarding the declaration of April 23 as “Book Day”.
The Timișoara Polytechnic University Library, the most modern in the country, wanted to mark this day by offering users, students and teaching staff, the opportunity to wear the librarian’s coat for a day, to learn how access cards are made, how to search in the electronic catalog, how to make self-check loans, how to access the databases, how the Aleph special program works, etc. Even the rector of UPT, conf. univ. dr. ing. Florin Drăgan, wore the T-shirt with “Today I am your librarian”, surprising the students by appearing at the registration desk at the UPT Library. It was a good opportunity to see all the work done by the UPT librarians and to thank them for their work.
Also on April 23, 2024, the “Digitization and digital storage” workshop was organized at the UPT Library, addressed to all librarians in Timiș County, followed by a visit to the Mechatronics Department of the Timișoara Polytechnic University, where the book digitization process takes place .
As stated by Dr. Eng. Agneta Lovazs, the event had the role of emphasizing the importance of digitization, but also the huge work behind it. In the Timișoara Technical University Library, digitization began in 2019, and since then more than 5,500 titles have reached the Digital Repository (including the entire collection of doctoral theses from 1990 to the present), totaling about one million pages.
Currently, the UPT Library has more than 350,000 book titles in its warehouses, and digitizing a book (scanning and processing the scanned document so that it can be used), with current technology, takes about 4 hours (in the case of old books, even more ).
