The Doina Cornea Private Collection is an invaluable historical source for those researching the biography and especially the dissident activities of the person labelled by the Western mass media as the “emblematic figure” of the Romanian resistance to Ceauşescu’s dictatorship. This collection comprises manuscripts of her open letters of protest, her diary, samizdat translations, correspondence, drafts of her academic works, photos, paintings, video recordings, and her personal library. This private collection is by far one of the most significant and valuable collections reflecting the cultural opposition to the Romanian communist regime.
The collection contains samizdat editions of religious literature and hymnals distributed in the underground church in the period between 1950 and 1989. It consists of the private collections of several anonymous monks and nuns of the secretly organized Dominican Order and School Sisters of St. Francis in several places of Slovakia. The library contains a large number of literature written in exile. The Dominican Book Institute helps communities to type and catalogue books but it does not own these books, their owners are the friaries of the province of the Dominican Order.