Rariora Reading Room for early printed books and manuscripts

To the Rariora Reading Room, you can request:

  • materials from the rare books collection (call nos. starting with ‘R’)
  • materials published until 1917
  • materials from the Estica collection
  • materials from the archival collection of the national imprint
  • materials from memorial collections
  • Estonian newspapers published until 1945 that have not yet been digitised
  • UT dissertations
  • geographical maps
  • manuscripts
  • photos
  • works of art
  • pamphlets

Rules of Rariora Reading Room can be found here.

Have a look at the descriptions of collections of the UT Library.

Requests are fulfilled within three hours, Monday to Friday between 12:00 and 16:00. Requests placed after 16:00, on weekends, or on public holidays are fulfilled at 12:00 on the next working day.

In the Rariora Reading Room you can find:

  • on open shelves, a selection of general encyclopaedias, dictionaries, biographical and bibliographical lexicons, printed catalogues, address books, literature on history, jurisprudence, theology, book history, etc;
  • catalogues of special collections (rare books, manuscripts, photos, works of art), inventories of personal archives, and inventories of institutional or organizational archive collections;
  • authorised workstation for reading digital legal deposit copies (e-books and other e-publications), stored in the digital archive DIGAR with access restrictions set by the publishers.

You can order digital copies of the requested material and of the books held on the open shelves of the reading room. You can take photos with your personal camera in the silent mode without using the flash and the tripod.