# Romania's village libraries: nearly half have gone dark since 2007

Public libraries · 2,862 rural communes · 1995–2025

Rural Romania is divided into 2,862 communes, local authorities that usually group several villages under one town hall. In 2007, 2,636 of them had a public library counted by the national statistics institute. By 2025, 1,382 did. In 577 of those, the libraries in the commune together reported exactly the same number of volumes as the year before, and in 568 no spending on books was recorded under the town hall’s library budget line. Every light on the map is a commune with a library.

## How many village libraries have gone dark since 2007?

Romania’s library law (no. 334/2002, art. 33) says commune libraries “are organised and operate in every commune centre”, the village where the commune’s town hall sits, and are funded by the local council. On paper, then, each of the 2,862 communes should have a library.

Each year, Romania's National Institute of Statistics (INS) counts the libraries that operated during that year. Until 2011, close to 2,600 communes had a public library. In 2012 the total fell by 205, in 2013 by another 198, and the fall never stopped: 1,382 in 2025, out of 2,862.

On the map, a library that has gone dark is one that INS no longer counts. Town-hall budgets, a separate source, point the same way. Of the 961 communes that had a library in 2011 and none in any year from 2023 to 2025, 629 had, in 2025, neither library staff in the INS count nor staff costs under the public-library line of the town-hall budget. Even this check does not prove, commune by commune, that the library closed: it shows only that it is missing from both sources. For the other 332, the two sources disagree.

At the 2021 census, 4.5 million people, almost half of everyone living in a rural commune, lived in one that by 2025 had no public library counted by INS. Some of these communes are among the largest in the country, suburbs that grew up next to cities. Florești, next to the city of Cluj-Napoca, had 52,735 residents in 2021; INS last counted a public library there in 2019. In Chiajna, on the edge of Bucharest, the capital, the last year was 2011. INS still counts school libraries in both.

## In how many communes with a public library has the total number of volumes stopped changing?

INS also publishes how many volumes the libraries in each place hold between them: books, pamphlets, bound newspapers and other items. The total rises when additions exceed write-offs and falls when write-offs exceed additions. When it is identical to last year’s, down to the last volume, either nothing came in or went out, or exactly as many volumes arrived as were written off.

In 2025 that happened in 577 of the 1,376 communes with a public library and a volume count published for both years (42%). In 2012 it was one in five. In towns and cities the share is 9%. In 110 communes, the number stayed the same five years in a row, from 2020 to 2025. In 568 of the 577, the town hall also recorded no spending on books under the library line: 454 have other spending there but none on books, and 114 have nothing recorded under that line at all.

In 463 of these communes, INS also counts a school or other library, and the total covers them all. In the other 114, the public library is the only one, so the number is its own. Reader and loan counts change almost everywhere: only 2 communes reported the same totals for volumes, active readers and loans. If a library copies last year’s volume count onto the form without checking it, the data cannot show that.

## How much do rural town halls spend on books for their library?

Town-hall budgets, reported to the Ministry of Finance, have a separate line for public libraries. In 2025, the town halls of rural communes recorded 97.6 million lei (about €19.5 million) for staff costs and 568 thousand lei (about €114 thousand) for books there. For every leu (Romania's currency; plural lei) recorded for books, 172 went on staff.

Of the 1,314 communes with staff costs under this line in 2025, 1,199 recorded nothing at all for books. Books can arrive by other routes: from the county library, from donations, from Ministry of Culture programmes, or paid for under another budget line.

Another 263 communes with a public library counted by INS have no staff costs under this line at all. The library may be funded under another line, for example together with the village cultural centre (cămin cultural); these data do not show where. Each commune profile says so where it applies.

## Village libraries, county by county

Proportionally, the most were lost in Constanța and Teleorman: by 2025, fewer than a quarter of the communes that had a library in 2007 still had one. The smallest falls were in Vâlcea and Neamț, but in Vâlcea 48 of the 68 communes that still have a library reported the same number of volumes as in 2024.

## How it was counted

Libraries: INS table ART101B (public libraries by locality, 1995–2025). A commune has a library in a given year if INS counts at least one public library there; INS records only units that operated that year. For 1990–1994 INS publishes county totals only (ART101C): 2,620 commune libraries in 1990.

Volumes, active readers and loans (ART106A, ART107A, ART108A, 2011–2025) are per locality, for all its libraries, school ones included; staff figures (ART121A) include school-library personnel only from 2016. “Same number of volumes” means the locality's total equals the year before; where the commune has other libraries too, the comparison is of the total, and each library's own stock may have changed. In 225 communes the public library is the only one counted, so the figures are its own.

Money: payments reported by town halls to the Ministry of Finance under budget line 67.03.02 (commune, town and city public libraries), via Transparenta.eu: staff costs, including employer contributions (budget code 10) and “books, publications and documentation” (article 20.11), in 2023, 2024 and 2025. Each town hall was matched to its commune through SIRUTA, Romania's official locality code, in its own registry record. A commune with nothing under this line may fund its library under another one. Euro amounts at about 5 lei to the euro.

The rejection thresholds were fixed after a first look at the data, disclosed alongside them, and before the confirmatory run. A library that drops out of the INS count is called “gone dark” only if at least 60% of such cases also show no staff in the INS count and no staff costs under the library line (result: 65.5%). The “same number of volumes” comparison would have been dropped if readers and loans were also identical to the year before in at least 20% of communes (result: 0.3%).

What these data cannot say: how many volumes each library bought or received (INS does not report additions and write-offs separately), how often the library is open, or any link with pupils’ school results, which also depend on income, distance and emigration. Paleu commune (Bihor) is missing from the INS library tables.

## Sources

- [INS TEMPO, ART101B: libraries by category, county and locality](http://statistici.insse.ro:8077/tempo-online/)
- [INS TEMPO, ART101C: libraries by category and county (1990–2025)](http://statistici.insse.ro:8077/tempo-online/)
- [INS TEMPO, ART106A, ART107A, ART108A, ART121A: volumes, active readers, loans, staff, by locality](http://statistici.insse.ro:8077/tempo-online/)
- [INS, Library activity: metadata and quality report](https://insse.ro/cms/files/Rapoarte%20de%20calitate/cultura/Activitatea-bibliotecilor.pdf)
- [Library Law no. 334/2002, art. 33 (Portal Legislativ, in Romanian)](https://legislatie.just.ro/Public/DetaliiDocument/36728)
- [Ministry of Finance, budget execution of local authorities, via Transparenta.eu](https://transparenta.eu/)