The ASTRA County Library

1861 was a great year for the entire Transylvania for at Sibiu they inaugurated The Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and Romanian Culture (ASTRA), an academic society fighting for the rights of the Romanians from Transylvania who were still under Hapsburg occupation and after 1867, under Austro-Hungarian occupation.

As literary writings were a strong element of cultural unification for Romanians, in the same era they also set up the ASTRA Library. The great personalities of those times (Octavian Goga, Nicolae Cristea, Vasile Goldiş, Al. Papiu Ilarian, Mihail Kogălniceanu, Andrei Mureşanu, Titu Maiorescu and many others) contributed to the enrichment of the collection of books available at the library - its current collections are part of the national cultural heritage.

To keep up with the new technologies, in 2007 the library inaugurated its B wing, a building equipped with cutting edge technology. Today, the library holds over 680,000 documents, books, journals, CDs, DVDs, manuscripts, correspondence documents, old Romanian books, medals, rare documents and so on. The collection of books is also very diverse and it includes various materials in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Hebrew, Esperanto, Greek, Hungarian and Russian.

The library currently hosts exhibitions, private viewings, workshops, reading evenings, educational events for children, researches and various cultural educational events. Also, the library provides its visitors with free internet access.