The building of a library is a fundamental gesture of hope, if not in the perfectibility of humankind, at least in its mission to affirm and make accessible the legacy of scholars, researchers and creative minds of the past and present and the capacity of that legacy to guide and inspire the future, and thus to advance the prospects of all individuals and society as a whole. No serious education – particularly higher education – is possible without adequate libraries. Those who do not have such access for whatever reason are condemned to the most limited purchase on the possibilities the world has to offer. This essay addresses the fate of Bosnian libraries, efforts to ameliorate their condition, successes and failures in that regard, and reflections upon the state of similar institutions in Iraq and current efforts to address their plight, following a few thoughts concerning libraries and politics.

In Clausewitz’s famous aphorism, war is described as an extension of politics by other means, but in most cases it would seem truer to say that, in the era of the modern nation-state, war is the product of failed politics. And war is the great cultural destroyer. Whatever the proximate causes of cultural calamities such as the devastation or destruction of libraries on a wide scale, as have occurred in Bosnia and Iraq, they may be broadly seen as a consequence of political failures.

In ex-Yugoslavia, a sclerotic regime fell by its own weight. Civil society having been unable to thrive under the heavy hand of the communist state, rabid nationalism tendentiously linked to religion occupied the vacuum. The modern history of Bosnia and Herzegovina actually commenced with a political success – the peaceful transfer of what had once been a favored province of the Ottoman empire to the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1878 – and its distinctive multicultural/multi-confessional character was the legacy of those vanished empires, spared the destructive wars of national formation that had marked much of the rest of the Balkans. In 1992 it fell victim to the lust for power on the part of Milosevic and Tudjman and the essentializing ideologies mobilized by them that found the Bosnian melting pot an affront to their aggressive, simplifying programs and a temptation to their desire for larger territories. Those with no compunctions concerning mass murder and expulsion of populations did not shrink from targeting the cultural institutions that represented all that they anathematized.

In Iraq, an inherently undemocratic system created under the conditions of colonialism, resulting from the betrayal of Arab aspirations inspired by the events of WWI, led in an unhappy dynamic fueled by ideology and grievance steadily down hill to the Baath regime. Saddam Hussein’s decades of despotic rule had similarly extinguished virtually all vestiges of civil society, leaving those not altogether criminalized by life in such a state largely to the refuge of family and religion. The invasion, itself a breach of trust with the American nation by the Bush administration, based on false information, uncertain motives and misperceived ends, and representing the most dramatic failure of the international system in fifty years, created a vacuum of power when it toppled the Iraqi regime. Fatally, the occupiers failed to impose their authority immediately. Utter chaos was the inevitable and predictable result, with those criminally inclined (whether calculating or opportunistic) stealing everything in sight, looting virtually every significant cultural and governmental institution – including university libraries – of everything of perceived value down to the copper wiring.

Whatever the immediate causes of devastation to Bosnian and Iraqi libraries and though Iraq did not suffer the uniquely terrible, nearly total loss of its national library or its principal manuscript collection, the consequences were still very similar as are the ideal remedies. Both calamities happened in once promising but underdeveloped polities that now face the daunting task of climbing out from under the wreckage.

Although a large number of smaller private and institutional libraries were destroyed in the war against Bosnia, the latter frequently associated with mosques and monasteries, the worst destruction occurred in Sarajevo during the longest siege in modern history. The burning of the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Sarajevo on August 25-26, 1992 was neither the first nor the last outrage against culture in that war. Serb nationalist forces had shelled and destroyed the collections of Sarajevo’s Oriental Institute that May, and six faculty libraries of the University of Sarajevo were destroyed and another four severely damaged during the course of the siege. Similarly, Sarajevo’s Municipal Public Library lost half of its 300,000 volumes and the use of its central and four branch libraries.

The Serb forces fired incendiary phosphorus shells at the grand and elegant stained-glass skylight over the atrium of the Vijecnica, the splendid Moorish-revival building that had been founded under Austrian rule as the seat of government and transformed into the National Library after WWII. The ensuing conflagration was unstoppable. Although a significant number of rare manuscripts and books were salvaged by the staff under daunting conditions (and collections of tertiary value, stored off site, were spared), some ninety percent of the library’s contents were consumed, including as many as 1,500,000 volumes, numerous special collections, the greatest collection of Bosnian periodical literature since its beginnings in the nineteenth century, and the archives of the various ethnic and cultural societies that had been consolidated there at the time of the library’s establishment. The Vijecnica itself survived as a shell, its fine marble revetments burnt to lime, its lovely rooms laid waste.

So what was to be done? Nothing much while the siege raged and the library’s remnants and its remaining staff survived in several basement venues in the city. It is impossible to overestimate the costs of the calamity that befell that National Library in the context of the war. The catalogue was destroyed, so records of what had been as well as for what survived were lost, the latter in need of rebuilding. UNESCO estimated that 70% of the librarians present before the war were no longer in the country at its end, and a similar fate befell the staff of the National Library, where staff morale and capacity to function effectively were undermined by their experiences and the daunting task of renovating a ruined institution.

At war’s end in early 1996, more than three years since the wrecking of Sarajevo’s principal cultural institutions, there was no specific international agreement that this damage had to be made right by concerted action and no actors who took long-range responsibility for such an undertaking. The major players seem to have felt that their task was done when the portions of the former Marshall Tito Barracks, dedicated to be a temporary National Library but containing only 35% of the space in the Vijecnica, were physically restored to a functional state. Even this took years fully to accomplish, using funds from the World Bank, USAID, UNESCO and the Soros Foundation. A German donation of stacks provided a place to put surviving and donated books. Despite a UNESCO assessment report published at the beginning of 1996 promoting comprehensive staff training and development, collection rebuilding, automation and connectivity among major libraries; in fact, only the most limited funds were provided toward these ends. Indeed, the diminished Bosnian national government, undermined by an administrative system only Rube Goldberg could love but imposed by the Dayton Accords (two entities, most power devolved to the cantonal and municipal level), has progressively decreased funding for the National Library. Similarly, the Oriental Institute had to make do with much diminished quarters, as I discovered when the Bosnia Library Project’s second major donation to them proved to be all that they could physically handle.

No internationally coordinated initiative was undertaken to assist in the rebuilding of destroyed and damaged library collections. Among other unfortunate efforts, one misbegotten book drive had already resulted in tens of thousands of largely useless books fetching up in a warehouse in Maribor, Slovenia while the siege still raged.  In this vacuum, the Bosnia Library Project was conceived in early 1996 at Harvard by Andras Riedlmayer and myself, and I became its coordinator.^[2] In brief, we solicited and received the support of Neil Rudenstine, then President of Harvard, and, through him, a commitment by the Harvard University Press for two copies of every title on its list. This was quickly followed by like commitments from the University of Chicago, MIT, Princeton and John’s Hopkins presses, with lesser donations from 16 other American scholarly presses. Replacing what had been lost to the fire was never going to be possible, but I was convinced that this caliber of donation would go a long way toward the rebuilding of a major collection. The heads of Harvard’s vast library system agreed to permit volunteer librarians to select from all materials passing through the department of Gifts and Exchange on a nearly monthly basis until it was closed down in late 2003. Some other institutional and many private donations regularly augmented these primary sources, the most valuable being complete scholarly collections and long runs of journals.  Two years of lobbying and some fund raising resulted in three full sets of the Library of America being donated to libraries in Sarajevo, Tuzla and Mostar.

OCLC, the Online Computer Library Center, Inc., undertook a search of 36,000,000 library records and came up with 103,983 records of Bosniaca in American libraries, in the event that microforms needed to be created of any titles to replace losses. Although this file was sent in late 1996 to the National Library in Sarajevo, it has just been established that it was never received, probably resulting from the unpredictable state of the postal system, which had been non-functional during the war. This snafu has just been discovered (May 2004) and is about to be remedied. OCLC also agreed to provide bibliographic records from the ISBN lists submitted by the scholarly presses of their donations to the Bosnia Library Project to assist in the daunting cataloguing task awaiting the Bosnian librarians.

From the beginning, the Bosnia Library Project operated in partnership with the Sabre Foundation of Cambridge, Massachusetts, which had many years’ experience in book donation projects and the knowledge of logistics in warehousing, transport and distribution of donated materials. With its assistance, several academic and institutional libraries in Sarajevo, Tuzla and Mostar have benefited from our donations.

This represents the successful aspect of this Project. Although I had not set eyes on the UNESCO report at the time, in 1999 I enlisted colleagues in Sarajevo, Maribor and London in creating a comprehensive proposal designed to initiate a renascence in Bosnian academic libraries. It would have provided funds for systematic professional development, for hardware and software necessary to create a Bosnia-wide system to enhance cataloguing, collection management and user access, for continued donations of publications at a high level, and for a preservation department for the National Library. Of these, the latter, provided independently by the Spanish National Library, and a visual library for the Faculty of Architecture, support for which was solicited by me from IFLA (the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions), was all that was achieved. I was unable to find an interested foundation or granting agency. Both timing – too long after the events – and lack of contacts on my part doubtless played a role. To this day, Bosnian libraries have inadequate hardware and are proceeding very slowly toward the kind of connectivity necessary to optimize the work of their strained staffs and budgets.

Iraq
The differences and similarities between the Bosnian and Iraqi cases are both marked. Underdeveloped and destroyed and damaged collections in both places, although the underdevelopment is worse in Iraq, being due to twenty-four rather than four years of lost contact with Europe and the United States. Institutions in both countries were in an etiolated state due to politics, under funding and lack of contact with the outside world, though, again, chronically worse in Iraq. Although not driven out by war, lack of support caused many professional Iraqi librarians to leave the country. However, while the damage in Bosnia was principally focused on Sarajevo and the utterly devastated National and University Library and Oriental Institute, the orgy of looting unleashed in Iraq in the absence of any authority willing to stop it was all pervasive outside Kurd-held territories in the North.

Between June and November 2003, several reports^[3] commenced the process of assessing the damage to and status of Iraqi cultural and educational institutions, including libraries and archives. While varying in focus, scope, specificity and quality, these reports did provide a depressing picture of the dismal state of the libraries and of how much was yet to be learned about their condition and the status of their holdings in specific terms.

The initial good news was that, although the structure of the Iraqi National Library had been irremediably damaged, the provident actions of its staff and of a Shi’ite cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr, had insured that substantial portions of the book and archival collections had been spared. However, the latest word, from Sa’ad Iskandar, newly-appointed director of the National Archives and Documentation Center, is that at least 60% of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman documents were lost, and the full extent of the damage will not be known until a comprehensive cataloging is completed. Furthermore, the removed archival documents, due to having been placed in the basement of the Board of Tourism, were soaked when it was flooded due to the collapse of Baghdad’s infrastructure. They were moved thence in early autumn to a space above ground level, where the Library of Congress mission saw them in November exhibiting “extensive and active mold growth.” Some weeks thereafter they were finally placed in three large freezers where they await conservation. Compared with this equivocal result, the Ministry of Religious Endowments (al-Awqaf) Library had fared worse. It had been burned and apparently looted of some of its holdings, and only a portion of them, which included a large and important collection of Qur’ans, was spared. The best news was that the collections of the (ex-Saddam) Centre for Manuscripts in Baghdad, whose holdings comprised ca. 40,000 manuscripts collected from all over Iraq, was saved. Its loss would have been the equivalent for Iraq and its cultural heritage that the destruction of the Oriental Institute’s collections was to Bosnia.

In this grim situation, it could be considered promising that, given the expectations in international law concerning the responsibilities of occupying powers, the fundamental principle, “You broke it, you fix it” should apply, and that the primary agent of action (or, rather, inaction in failing to impose its authority after toppling a totalitarian regime) was the richest, most powerful nation on earth. In the Iraqi case, invasion, looting and devastation all took place in a matter of weeks. The whole world was watching (unlike in the Bosnian case). The drama of the Iraq Museum held center stage and compelled attention to the fate of cultural institutions, hence the numerous visits of foreign deputations to assess their conditions. Consequently, the possibility of well-funded, concerted action remains reasonably high and a beginning has been made, with the well-appointed Officers’ Club in Baghdad being allocated to a new National Library, extant buildings being used for offices and reading rooms while the building to hold the stacks being planned for its grounds.

The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988 had nearly brought to an end the acquisition of titles and periodical subscriptions from Europe and the US at Iraqi libraries due to a withdrawal of government funding. What little was accomplished in the 1980s ceased altogether in the 1990s with the embargo. Thus even surviving Iraqi library collections are woefully out of date. The effects of the looting ranged from little of the collection being stolen in Mosul to nearly the whole principal library of the University of Basrah – along with other university and municipal libraries in a city which had already suffered terribly in the Iran-Iraq War – being incinerated and the entire collection of 175,000 books and manuscripts at the library of the University of Baghdad’s College of Arts being reduced to ashes. Moreover, everything that could be taken was taken, down to electrical wiring. We have received lists of lost equipment and furnishings for a few university libraries. That for Al-Mustansiriyah University Library in Baghdad covers 21 classes of items, from 27 computers to 60 fluorescent bulbs.

Infrastructure must be addressed before Iraqi institutions can effectively handle large donations of publications. Due to the looting, these libraries became virtually an infrastructural tabula rasa. The most recent reports indicate that considerable headway is being made in the most basic refurnishing of these institutions. I have emphasized to the representatives of the CPA responsible for education and culture that this is the moment to design interconnected automated systems to link the principal Iraqi academic libraries and foster cooperative cataloguing and other online functions, which provide direct benefits to limited staffs and to users by obviating duplicated effort, expediting access and increasing awareness of holdings throughout the country. Happily, they have indicated that they will address this important question.

Coordination and control are the bywords that should govern all assistance to Iraqi academic libraries. This is to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, to make sure that the Iraqi recipients receive publications of value to them, to maximize efficiency and breadth of distribution and mitigate the burdens on the recipients. I had hoped that IFLA would act as a clearinghouse for aid proposals or, at the very least, establish a monitored web page where initiatives could be posted and commented upon. After considerable lobbying, IFLA is still only posting information in a fitful and unsystematic way. One must still perform a search employing the term “Iraq” to find what is available on the site. This is disappointing but has been in good part compensated for by the IraqCrisis website hosted by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago and managed by Charles Jones,^[4] who has posted many useful reports, descriptions of efforts at assistance that are already underway, and other information, particularly concerning Iraqi archival collections. Importantly, it provides contact information for the principal administrators at all Iraqi academic institutions. The idea here is to be able to link specific donors with specific institutions and thus facilitate the communication that should lead to effective assistance.

Although there was a moment when it looked as if the APO (Army Post Office) system could be generally employed to expedite carefully selected small donations, this proved true only in a couple of ad hoc cases. The US State Department will provide such assistance only in the case of donations of publications directly to the National Library and Iraq Museum. Since this is supposed to operate via the Cultural Department of the CPA and that institution will go out of existence at the end of June, it remains to be seen whether a useful mechanism will be in place even for this limited number of recipients. In any event, as of mid-April, not a single book had arrived at the library of the Iraq Museum via this route. Consequently, a mechanism must be developed for the efficient and cost-effective delivery of small but high quality donations.

This issue of effective and even-handed delivery mechanisms is primary to any worthwhile effort to rebuild the book collections of Iraqi libraries. For larger donations, similar coordination is critical, and appropriate warehousing and distribution arrangements of the sort insisted upon by the Sabre Foundation are needed. However, Sabre typically relies on a partner NGO in the recipient country to play this role. Saddam Hussein’s totalitarian regime did not tolerate the kind of independent initiative that permits civil society to thrive. It remains to be seen how soon an acceptable partner can be found – or reasonable, temporary substitute – however; Wishyar Muhammed, Councilor for libraries of the Ministry of Culture, and his colleagues in Iraq are addressing the same issue and some solution will be arrived at. USAID HEAD (Higher Education and Development Program) for Iraq is sponsoring three large-scale efforts to assist specified Iraqi universities or disciplines: (1) Stony Brook University, in a consortium with Columbia, Boston University and Oxford, will modernize curricula and research programs in environmental health and in archaeology and Assyriology in partnership with Baghdad University, Al-Mustansiriyya University in Baghdad, and Mosul and Basrah Universities; (2) the University of Hawaii’s College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources will endeavor to strengthen academic programs, research infrastructure and extension training at the University of Mosul’s College of Agriculture and Forestry and the University of Dohuk; (3) the Human Rights Institute of DePaul University College of Law in conjunction with the International Institute of Higher Studies in Criminal Sciences at Siracusa, Italy will work with the University of Baghdad in an effort to generate broad-based reform of the legal system in Iraq.

WHO (World Health Organization) recently announced that it will undertake the comprehensive rehabilitation of Iraqi medical libraries. How this might be coordinated with the more specialized Stony Brook-led effort is not clear. They have done their homework and have identified seventeen health sciences libraries in Iraq of which they consider nine to be critical, although all will receive attention. UNESCO has expressed its intentions to assist Iraqi libraries for over a year now without publicly announced specific plans of action or concrete results, as far as I can determine.

These are all laudable initiatives. However, other US government-funded programs seem to be presently operating on an almost first-come, first-served basis. A University of Oklahoma-based book donation project has so far demonstrated itself to be resistant to efforts by Arthur Smith of OCLC and me to assist them in developing a disciplined and effective process.

The most widely publicized book donation to date provides an example of how not to proceed. Initially, the British Council accepted a reported ten tons of donations from English universities, although the news as of April 2004 is that the total of British donations from various sources and by this means has risen to 23 tons. The bulk of these were boxed and delivered en masse via Amman to Baghdad, with a smaller amount delivered to Basrah. Although this demonstrates an admirable capacity to ship very large quantities of donations (courtesy of the British army?), recent news from informal sources is that tons of books from this donation are languishing in a warehouse in Baghdad and that no one has yet figured out a way to distribute them. This is what happens when donations are not thoroughly organized, lack intellectual control over contents and are sent without arrangements made in advance and agreements specifying recipients. Who is to sort it all out?

In this light, it is always worth emphasizing that any proposed donation must be critically examined with the best interests of the recipient in mind, not the convenience of the donor. The sins of the typical book drive are the donation of last year’s potboilers and self help books, outdated reference works, stray copies or badly broken runs of journals, good books in bad shape and other sins of the well intentioned but thoughtless. The Stony Brook-led initiative will also develop library collections on archaeology and environmental health at targeted institutions. In contrast to the many sins of omission and commission that blight the record of book donation projects past, Stony Brook has developed a productive relationship with OCLC.

OCLC has offered to provide the same service for Iraq that they provided to the Bosnia Library Project for gifts to Bosnian libraries but with significant enhancements: submission of lists of ISBN numbers will result in bibliographic records for all titles in a specific donation. For most donations 99% of the titles will have pre-existing cataloging records in WorldCat, the OCLC database. This means that if each book were matched with its record before shipment, the cataloging record including a card and an electronic record could accompany the book. From this record a spine label could also be created and attached in advance of shipment. In the case of the Stonybrook initiative, OCLC will actually receive the donated books, complete the process themselves and send them along to Iraq.

Another benefit to this intermediate step would be that “electronic catalogues” for each recipient Iraqi library would be created as the books are cataloged. This means that when a library was ready to build its own electronic catalogue, the records could simply be downloaded to their local system. In the meantime, WorldCat would act as an active, temporary catalogue where each recipient library and its users could access their own holdings so long as it had effective internet access.

Harvard’s libraries are working on two initiatives, one funded, the other in preparation. One, with Simmons School of Library and Information Science taking the lead, will result in significant professional development for selected Iraqi librarians, initially via intensive courses given in Amman, later with year-long fellowships to Simmons linked to internships at Harvard’s libraries. This should assist in bringing up-to-date skills and standards to Iraqi librarianship at a time when it is most needed. The first phases of this initiative have recently been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the preliminary working meeting will occur in Amman in mid-June 2004.

It is impossible for any one institution or effort to address the needs of Iraqi libraries across all disciplines. This work will take years. We at Harvard decided to take a topical approach: to solicit from academics in the appropriate disciplines a core bibliography of currently available titles, reference works and (where particularly important) journals for topics we consider critical to contemporary Iraqi society. The first topical collection to be developed is entitled “Establishing Democracy” and comprises a core bibliography of about 300 works on democracy and politics, and that especially focuses on issues of democratic development and stability.^[5] As committee member, Sidney Verba puts it,

The collection is not meant to be prescriptive. These books will offer no clearly marked route nor do they offer any particular model of democratic development. Rather, as any good library collection, they present the best learning, including the disputes within the field of inquiry. Democracy can take many forms and involves hard choices. These volumes would illuminate those choices with many examples of the ways in which other nations have dealt with them.

The second general topic to be developed focuses on the “Ecology of Water;” its core bibliography will therefore cover the three related sub-categories of wetlands ecology, riparian ecology, and landscape ecology; plus a fourth bibliography, which addresses the inescapable issues of politics and conflict resolution related to water resources management. Issues related to water have been critical throughout Iraq’s past, and will remain so in the future. Turkey’s Il_su project to dam the Tigris upriver from Iraq, for instance, has profound implications for water management within Iraq. The environmental consequences of Saddam Hussein’s politically-driven decision to destroy the wetlands in the Shatt al-Arab (in order to eradicate the subsistence system of the Marsh Arabs), likewise demand attention. These lists are being prepared by Iraqi-born Professor Jala Makhzoumi, now at the American University in Beirut, and her professional colleagues.

We envision other topics in the spheres of economics and technology and one on librarianship. We have chosen our topics with the knowledge that they are and will be complemented by other initiatives, such as the three USAID HEAD projects cited above.

A final feature of this initiative will be the development of a collection of basic reference resources. Such reference works are essential for all academic endeavors, yet Iraqi university libraries either lack these materials altogether or only hold outdated versions. While many of the most critical resources will be those found anywhere in the world, considerations of culture, language, and academic priorities suggest that the holdings we provide will most usefully reflect those at the best modern academic libraries within the Arab world. Contemporary reference resources, even more than the topical collections described above, come in a variety of formats and delivery mechanisms.

Finally, internet access is also critical. It is expensive and best accomplished in a coordinated fashion. In a trial effort, J-STOR has agreed to give the University of Basrah two years of access to its resources, comprising 390 academic journals online. Ideally, it should be available to all Iraqi academic institutions, although Basrah is especially worthy since its libraries were particularly devastated. Ultimately, funds would be required for more comprehensive access and are further dependent on the reconstruction of the infrastructure of Iraqi academic libraries already discussed.

Nearly every week, one hears of some initiative, project or meeting addressing some aspect of Iraqi higher education. No such effort makes any sense without a vivid understanding of the role of libraries in making advanced education a reality. I can only hope that international awareness and commitment to libraries will be more responsible and sustained in the case of Iraq than it has been in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The political situation, perilous and uncertain as it is, makes concerted and effective efforts at reconstruction more difficult, and I am concerned over what may be lost in terms of human contacts and developing understanding and process with each political transition that is envisioned. Nevertheless, a viable Iraqi state will be reliant upon a thriving and effective system of higher education and well-stocked, well-functioning libraries will be its very foundation, so I can only hope that these will receive sustained attention.