Museums, Nationality, and Public Research Libraries in Nineteenth-Century Transylvania

Abstract

In nineteenth-century Transylvania (now in Romania but then a province of Hungary) Germans, Hungarians, and Romanians all attributed special importance to research collections in the creation of their political nations. This study traces the development of the most important repositories of the respective nations: the Germans' Brukenthal Museum, the Hungarians' Transylvanian Museum Society, and the Romanians' Astra. These institutions arose as hybrid museum-libraries and even included archives. Despite this common conception, they developed differently due to the nature of their constituencies, the growing professionalization of libraries, museums, and archives, and political change within Hungary and Romania.