Special Collections Librarian Sentiment about the Destruction in Sarajevo

Mark Edwin Peterson

Background

It has now been over a generation since the Bosnian War, the first disintegration of what had been Yugoslavia. Discussion of the conflict at the time largely focused on the horrifying violence taking place once again in Europe. Another aspect that shocked many, however, was the ways in which the destruction of cultural heritage served as a tool of genocide during the four years of war. Effective as any carpet-bombing raid, armies on all sides set fire to many historically-significant monasteries, schools, churches, and mosques. The most dramatic example occurred in May of 1992, when Serbian troops directed white phosphorous artillery shells at the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo, completely destroying one of the world's most important collections of medieval Islamic manuscripts. Two months later, the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina, housed in Sarajevo's historic city hall, was also effectively destroyed. Unique archival collections and rare codices were lost.

International calls went out almost immediately to rebuild the collections of Sarajevo, but aid agencies were able to do very little on the ground until the war was over. Cultural heritage groups offered their sympathy, and librarians looked for replacements to donate, but the results were disappointing and never really accomplished much, even after decades of effort.¹

Although the city hall was eventually rebuilt years after the war, few manuscripts were ever recovered or replaced in any way. City leaders moved the National Library,² specializing now in online sources, to the university campus, and the Oriental Institute opened as a research center with less than 1% of its former collection.³ Important resources for understanding the history of a city and many aspects of life in the Ottoman Empire are gone forever.

Countless disasters such as these litter the wake of library history. Fire, mold, and war find the crowded bookshelves just as easily as patrons. When special collections of rare books or archival documents become damaged, as in Sarajevo, that diminishes our world culture in crises that cause strong emotional reactions in many people.⁴

You would think that we would be spurred to learn from these events. In the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, however, the international community turned away from the Sarajevo libraries as a research topic just as much as they neglected to help in concrete ways. After the first public reactions around the world, not much more was heard about Sarajevo's libraries, certainly not in English-language scholarship, which in a few cases has looked at political issues such as the international laws protecting cultural heritage, or the destructive Bosnian cultural policies since the war.⁵ My research here does nothing to provide further insight into the lessons of Sarajevo for the preservation or recovery of cultural heritage. What I want to do, however, is use these historic events, and our continuing public memory of them, to investigate some of the underlying sentiments that spark our emotional reactions and shape our views on the destruction of books more generally. Along the way, I hope to call attention to the destruction of Balkan cultural heritage in general (going back to the early twentieth century!) and spark further discussion of how librarians and other stewards can respond to wartime attacks on culture. My particular interest is American libraries holding special collections, because they hold so much unique material from around the world that has limited connections to contemporary American culture. Their collections serve as global storehouses, and they can be especially important in determining what material can be recovered after disaster. To begin to understand what such libraries do, I first look to the their own thoughts on what cultural heritage is for, in general, and why written culture from around the world should be kept in their special collections. A clear idea of their academic mission and their cultural significance makes it easier to understand what American libraries can do to protect cultural heritage around the world, including efforts to influence the policies of the United States.

One significant work that does cover the destruction of Sarajevo's libraries is Richard Ovenden's recent Burning the Books. With the chapter, "Sarajevo Mon Amour," Ovenden lays out the events of 1992 step-by-step, with heavy stress on the heroism of librarians. He describes how attacks on cultural heritage harm the local community, and how rebuilding collections can play a part in helping people recover, making them feel resilient. "Despite these threats the preservation of knowledge goes on."⁶ Much of the preservation Ovenden discusses involves digitization. Producing digital surrogates makes it possible to give worldwide access to rare books, but it can also save books, in some ways, when the originals cannot be kept safe. Many of the special collections in the United States have pursued digitization in a big way for over thirty years, in order to let the world know about their treasures but also to keep fragile paper from being handled by every researcher with an interest in the material. Their management of digital collections made up of rare written culture, is one more reason why American libraries play a significant role in how the international community responds to the destruction of libraries. András Riedlmayer, a fine arts cataloger at Harvard, has done a lot to put together what can be recovered from the items destroyed in Sarajevo into digital copies, available to everyone. His example, discussed below, illustrates the potential of librarians to work directly at cultural recovery and to advocate for stronger protections.

A very different result of American efforts to digitize library material can be seen in the presence of special collections on social media. Because they can pull interesting images from their stores of material and can link them to unfamiliar bits of history, the librarians and archivists who work with digital collections have strong voices in the social media world of academic libraries, even for the university as a whole. The curator of early books & manuscripts at Harvard, John Overholt, has 22,689 followers on Twitter. Some institutional collections are even more popular. The libraries of the Smithsonian reach more than 66,000 people with their following on Instagram. Because prominent special collections post so much on Twitter, in particular, this study looks at tweets to track, along with more general mission statements, to show that special collections librarians in America consider the digital turn to be not just a new tool in their work to assemble material for researchers, while keeping that material safe, but also a method for libraries to continue to control and shape the resources available to those of us trying understand the culture of the past. Even as the world gains the ability to access so much information online, in the humanities knowledge continues to be shaped by libraries and, when it comes to academic research, to a surprising extent, by the digital resources controlled by special collections of American libraries.

The Lost Things before the Last

Computers today give us the impression that the internet makes all data available, and that an archive is a store of everything that has ever happened. Archivists are imagined as selecting the best items from a wealth of resources, so that we frequently hear that collections of various types have been "curated" by some unseen expert, with the authority to pick the best materials for users, from song lists to clothing lines to bread. Even Derrida wrote of the power that comes from controlling the archive.⁷ But none of this has anything to do with how historical archives work. It is not uncommon for historians to find that what they wanted to study is impossible, because no documentary evidence can be found in any collection. With new interests and new populations becoming the subject of humanities research (which is the normal evolution of academic scholarship), frustration grows as archives increasingly do not have what researchers need, and what they have come to expect from internet research. In this situation, many special collections have taken it upon themselves to increase their holdings to reflect their communities better, and in some cases, to address injustices of the past. Gaps in the archival record are understood to be a result of oppression, so the answer is to fill that emptiness. To expand collections, however, takes a great deal of creativity from both librarians and researchers, because in some cases the desired documents were never created or retained in the past. Dealing with absences has become a new model in serving patrons, even in a time when it feels like we are awash in information. The responses of wealthy American institutions to what they lack in the stacks will be important in understanding what needs to be done, mostly in terms of the absences that persist, to truly increase representation and understanding of peoples around the world. Librarians' thoughts on the destruction of materials in Sarajevo, show us some of their approaches to the issues of serving scholars when their subject cannot be covered by the usual tactics of research. In this catestrophic case, valuable resources provided information, and now they are gone, so people need new avenues to bypass the missing records and do research.

A second reason to pay attention to librarians' thoughts on Sarajevo is the more general issue of loss inherent in the collecting process mentioned earlier. Access may be increasing, but little written culture from anything beyond the recent past is truly being discovered, though improvements in access give the impression of history continually coming to light. Instead, each shelf weeding or leaky pipe at a library favors new replacements or space reassignments. Local archives lose their funding. National catalogs and interlibrary loan encourage librarians to worry less about preserving printed items that exist in other copies nearby, even digital ones, which means that physical holdings of historic publications have diminished dramatically in academic libraries, because of conscious decisions by administrators, while the increased focus on special collections has the effect of putting material, paradoxically, at greater risk through handling or disaster. The result is the loss of heritage which technology can only do so much to replace, even as digital access increases the demand for more. And combatants everywhere actively work to destroy the memory of their enemies.⁸ Richard Cox has estimated that the number of historic items destroyed in conflicts of the twentieth century surpassed the number saved. The cultural destruction has continued in Iraq and Syria, with little effective response from UNESCO or the International Committees of the Blue Shield.⁹ Looking at how libraries respond to this issue of loss can tell us how best to prepare for the realities of the future in which more and more written culture will be lost.

If the goal is to recover as much as possible about the people whose lives appear to have left no record for us to study, in an effort to expand the usefulness of special collections and to reduce their authority over what gets to be researched,¹⁰ then it must follow that we also need to acknowledge that the future will have new interests and methods of research. Just as much of the Classical world only survived in Arabic or Carolingian translations, the history that gets written by today's winners relies on the practices of last year's winners. When the United States looks very different, the country's historians will depend to some extent on the work being done in special collections now. So, the responses that American librarians have on the fate of Sarajevo's historic libraries can also reveal to us what academic institutions think that it is that are saving for, what the future means for special collections.

This is not to say that History as a field would falter without expanding libraries or changing the nature of archives. As Carolyn Steedman writes, "The practice of history in its modern mode is just one long exercise of the deep satisfaction of finding things."¹¹ In many cases, that means finding the few relevant bits out of oceans of data. Our digital world can make the situation worse than ever. This means that the work of the historian today is a process of winnowing as much as interpretation, but that has always been the case to some extent. And even when dealing with scarcity, researchers still follow the same path. The loss of documentation to the air raids on Tokyo or the rage of the Cultural Revolution has not stopped historians, but their work needs to be built on a foundation of evidence. In his last, unfinished book, History: The Last Things before the Last, Siegfried Kracauer wrote that Historiography "is a distinctly empirical science which explores and interprets given historical reality in exactly the same manner as the photographic media render and penetrate the physical world about us."¹² Scholars use computers and scientific analysis, they focus on micro history on the small scale or look at grand sweeping historical vistas.¹³ The work involves artistry and technical expertise to create an digestible image of complexity, just as a photographer creates meaning out of the many possibilities of the visual. So, this all means that while special collections do need to consider the needs of current and future users. They do need to protect what is under their stewardship. But they also need an understanding of their role in research and cultural heritage that goes beyond providing service to their immediate users or to abstract ideas of history or justice. If academic libraries are to offset the general trends of fewer physical documents in fewer places involving greater risk, special collections in the United States need to consider what disaster means for communities and how to protect the written culture of the world. Preliminary results of my research on special collections suggests that this is only happening in a few cases where libraries have a sense of mission that includes responding to specific destruction as part of their jobs. Otherwise, umbrage and outrage seem to do little to defend culture or recover from disasters.

Judging Sentiment

For the central focus of this study, all the posts on Twitter since January 1, 2007 by 64 prominent American libraries, or in four cases librarians, were reviewed through qualitative analysis. I began the list of users largely based on more than ten years of following rare book issues on Twitter myself, but additional Twitter accounts were added because of connections to cities with large numbers of Bosnian immigrants or large collections of Islamic manuscripts. I included several complete academic library systems at major universities, because they oversaw libraries with relevant special collections and seemed to dominate the social media of the campus libraries. I also included some small, specialized libraries that had a focused interest on cultural heritage or book history.

Using the Academic Research track at the Twitter Developer API, I was able to search the entire public history of specific users, listed in Appendix A. Limits on the number of characters per search using the Postman app made it necessary to run single terms in two separate groups of users, but still, it was just a matter of running simple keyword searches against a list of Twitter accounts. The final terms used for this study can be found in Appendix B. Some of the initial searches returned irrelevant results or nothing at all. So, a number of initial search terms have not been analyzed for this paper but will be useful for later comparisons. Most notable among the poor results was the fact that the commonly used names for the two destroyed libraries by English speakers, the Oriental Institute of Sarajevo and the Vijecnica, did not appear in any tweets from this group in nearly fifteen years of Twitter. In fact, a search for "city hall sarajevo" did not bring up any new results beyond that found with other terms, either. More than 110 tweets did come up from these searches, however, which represents about 1% of the roughly 10,000-12,000 tweets created by these users, enough to say a few things about librarian views. It is worth remembering that Twitter did not exist in 1992, so the gathered tweets tended to reflect views on the general concept of library destruction, rather than horror at a recent atrocity.

The texts of the returned tweets were analyzed for sentiment using the Dedoose program to code and weight individual statements. Much of the coding merely identified the nature of the tweet, such as a retweet or an announcement of some event. However, each tweet was given a sentiment weight from 110 on what the tweet declared about the issue. Declarations were coded as only one type of either condemnation of library destruction, call for help for destroyed libraries, information about the destruction of these libraries, regret over the losses of war, or warning to protect other unique collections in the future. Some of these declaration categories that I set up could not be applied to any particular tweet, in the end, but that was valuable to the project in terms of determining the views that librarians did not consider. Initial analysis of the coding for this paper consisted of simple comparisons of sentiment weight and use of terms.

Additional sentiment research of librarian views online was conducted by downloading the text of library mission statements or, in some cases, collection strategies listed on the websites of special collections. The information on these sites varied a great deal, but no effort was made to track down annual reports or other official university statements unless such material was listed at the website of the collection without any other mission statement. The easier and more public nature of posting an "about" page means that they reflect the views of actual librarians more often than official university policies. Largely because time ran short, the texts of these websites were examined with just a simple word count analysis using Voyant Tools, for the group and for individual sites, to determine some general statements about what it is that librarians at these special collections think they do. What we can see is that the general goals of the libraries match up with the views expressed on Twitter about the need to give people access to their collections and a feeling that digitization offers hope for future preservation. Coming years after the events in Sarajevo, there was little sense that each library, or the book-loving public, had a responsibility to respond to the loss of culture with aid or condemnation, or even alarm at the possibility of being affected by disaster. The feeling was more that libraries should be ready to open their doors to help those who ask for it, while maintaining their position as stewards of their own material.

Few American institutions considered recovery or reconstruction of Sarajevo documents to be part of a larger cause that fit into the mission of the individual library. A final analysis of librarian sentiment looked not at public statements online, but at the views inherent in the collections themselves, available in the public catalog from those few collections that had a much more direct response to events in Bosnia. I compared the collections from the Human Rights Archive at Duke University, the Bosnia Memory Project at Fontbonne University, and the Fine Arts Library at Harvard University and compared them with several similar collections from the overall group to get a sense for what these three libraries considered important in forming their collections and how general those concerns might be to special collections in the United States. Each has a different approach, trying to include library destruction in the record of potential war crimes, to help the people who have left Bosnia-Herzegovina connect with common heritage, or to record the loss of cultural treasures, respectively. In the end, collections show how librarians seek to serve their users, to act as stewards of culture for their intended audiences, and to shape the foundations to humanities research.

Data

Initial results just how few of the tweets related to this topic directly. For instance, tweets about Serbian, (i.e. looking for topics such as Serbian actions, Serbian forces, Serbian war crimes, etc.) tended to cover a wide variety of issues, few of them having anything to do with libraries during the Bosnian war.

However, going through the process of coding all of the tweets returned for these terms did demonstrate enough excerpts with declarations about library aims in such a way that it was possible to weigh sentiment.

The main thing to say about results like these is that they show that special collections in the United States largely use Twitter to inform people about the events and collections in their own libraries. Tweets on libraries destroyed or books burned rarely had any connection to Sarajevo or any international collection at all, since the tweets on these topics also tended to focus on local interests, such as "on this day" trivia or connections to publicity for collections on site, with the exception of a few notices about Nazi book burning. The names of the authors Ovenden and Reidlemayer were searched for, after noticing the prevalence of author talks, and they did indeed bring back some of the most concrete references to the libraries in Sarajevo. Librarians announced that they liked a book about protecting libraries or had an author coming to campus. Even in these cases, informing the public was much more prevalent than any reaction to crimes of the past or concerns for the future. Much as archivists, and librarians in general, are seeking more and more to encourage more people to use their collections by including a wider body of material, none of these analyzed tweets mentioned anything about expanding collections. References to Islamic manuscripts were limited to new exhibits of beautiful works that had been acquired by collectors in the heyday of Orientalism. One exception is a tweet from the Newberry Library in Chicago during Banned Books Week, a celebrated event in the library world and a time when librarians are most outspoken about their positive role in society. "For the record, our official position is anti-books being banned or burned. Book burning is rooted in censorship, and has often been a way of exerting cultural, religious, or political control." Far more typical is a retweet from the Morgan Library in New York. "Thanks for putting your Islamic manuscripts online, @MorganLibrary! Glorious." This is not meant to indicate disappointment in the focus of library Twitter, just to point out the nature of how special collections librarians use tweets to connect with the public and build their brand. It would be helpful to carry out a more complete harvesting and coding of the tweets from these same institutions, in order to say anything deeper about their thoughts on the dangers of libricide or the effective ways to respond. This study does suggest, however, that few libraries feel any significant responsibility to call for the persecution of war crimes, the protection of libraries, or the recovery of cultural heritage.

A look at the ways in which libraries describe themselves confirms a focus on informing their patrons on site, as you would expect, and a mission to collect as much as the libraries can collect in the areas they have determined are worthwhile. Of course, not all special collections have collection budgets, so there is a bit of theater in some of these statements. For many institutions the mission statements serve more as justifications for turning away donations that just have nothing to do with the collections already on hand. Still, most of these libraries on my list have big enough budgets to spend at least some money pursuing their stated collecting goals. A simple look at some of their statements shows us some general themes.

These include building the collections, focusing on history and the needs of a diverse community, as well as the faculty and students on campus, providing them with services and a well-prepared staff so that they can conduct their research. One notable point is the greater interest in easily purchased and displayed books, rather than the difficult to obtain and describe archival collections. New and rare types of materials both get mentioned frequently, as do American and the general topic of World History. The main thing to notice with this simple type of review is that libraries do not mention any overarching body of standards to be maintained. The campus determines how the library does its work, and the needs of the campus community is really why the library exists, whatever they may say about being available to the community, which might suggest larger reasons why special collections do not have much to say on Twitter about dangers to cultural heritage or the issues of preservation.

By comparing focused collections to the general patterns of academic libraries in the United States we can see the importance of determined efforts to collect on specific topics in response to world events. The Center for Bosnian Studies, which was the Bosnian Memory Project until just recently, is housed at Fontbonne University in St. Louis, the city with the largest population of refugees from BosniaHerzegovina in the country. The library responds to the disruptions of war and emigration with an effort to record this history as it is going on, and to recover items dispersed by the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia because this activity is important to the community and many of the students at Fontbonne in terms of their sense of identity and belonging. "The Center began as the Bosnia Memory Project in 2006 and was renamed the Center for Bosnian Studies to reflect its increasing role as a hub of knowledge and resources on Bosnia. Part of the College of Arts and Sciences at Fontbonne University, it preserves stories and artifacts from the Bosnian war and genocide, through an oral history project, special collections with many rare items, and a growing digital collections of unique resources on Bosnia and its diaspora."¹⁴ Their holdings include a collection of propaganda distributed during the Bosnian War. Few libraries in the world have items like this, according to WorldCat. A search of the Yale library system brought up only a few books that have any connection to this topic.

One of the things that happened after the Bosnian War was that systematic destruction of cultural heritage became more firmly defined as a war crime by the international community. Though it is a small issue in their general list of interests, the Human Rights Archive at Duke University again shows that libraries concern themselves with the issues of protecting international culture when it fits as a specific issue within their defined mission. In line with their material on the abuses of the wars in Yugoslavia, the library contains a small number of items on the destruction and genocide that occurred in Sarajevo, with a few videos and articles on the fate of the libraries, much more than most American collections.

András Riedlmayer, a cataloger at the Fine Arts Library at Harvard, studied the architecture of the Ottoman Empire in his native Hungary before moving to Harvard. In response to the destruction of the Sarajevo libraries in 1992, Riedlmayer set about immediately contacting scholars who might have notes or photocopies of the material they had researched in Yugoslavia. Notices soon followed on international listservs for scholars and librarians. As the war continued and more cultural destruction followed it, he travelled to the region multiple times to try to document the loss of cultural heritage and call for punishment for the perpatrators. Riedlmayer eventually produced official reports and toured with a slideshow to show the world what had happened to culture in the region. His personal collection, housed at the fine arts library, contains over eighteen archival boxes of what he has managed to put together. Even though this is best collection in the world on what was lost in Bosnia, Kosovo, and the rest of what had been Yugoslavia, few actual manuscripts or even texts could be recovered in this process.¹⁵ The collection illustrates two things for us here. There is a huge difference between the general support of American special collections for the cultural heritage of the world and the libraries that fix on specific topics as connected to their academic mission to serve their users, as they define them. The other lesson of his work is just how difficult it really is to respond to libricide with any plan to rebuild collections. Even in cases that only involve contemporary publications, history has shown repeatedly that destruction means destruction. For unique or rare materials housed in special collections, the world as it is has few mechanisms in place to protect them, and no effective use of the moral authority of American libraries to orchestrate any forces of preservation or punishment for special collections. The weak responses to the destruction of books by major institutions on Twitter reflects this situation.

Appendix A: Tweeters

Appendix B: Twitter Search Terms

bosnia, burned books, genocide, islamic manuscripts, library destroyed, oriental institute, ovenden, sarajevo, serbian, yugoslavia, riedlmayer

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Footnotes

¹ Megan Kossiakoff, “The Art of War: The Protection of Cultural Property during the ‘Siege’ of Sarajevo,” DePaul Journal of Art, Technology & Intellectual Property Law 14, no. 1 Special Section: Art and War (2004): 161-63.

² Kristen M. Hartmann, “Fragmentation and Forgetting: Sarajevo’s Vijećnica,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 22, no. 4 (2016): 316.

³ Kemal Bakarŝić, “Back Where We Started: Bosnia’s Digital Archives,” Slavic & East European Information Resources 3, no. 2–3 (2002): 63.

⁴ Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020).

⁵ Giuditta Fontana, “War by Other Means: Cultural Policy and the Politics of Corporate Consociation in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Nationalism & Ethnic Politics 19, no. 4 (2013): 447–66.

⁶ Ovenden, Burning the Books, 168.

⁷ Carolyn Steedman, Dust (Manchester University Press, 2001). 1.

⁸ Brian M. Owens, “The Safeguarding of Memory: The Divine Function of the Librarian and Archivist,” Library & Archival Security 18, no. 1 (2003): 25.

⁹ Laila Hussein Moustafa, “Disaster Management Plans in Middle East Libraries and Archives in Time of War: Case Studies of Iraq and Egypt,” Library & Archival Security 26, no. 1–2 (2013): 17-19.

¹⁰ I will have to leave it to elsewhere to advance an argument that many of these efforts, however well-meaning, are actually efforts to extend librarian authority over realms that are already being discussed in scholarship.

¹¹ Steedman, Dust, 1.

¹² Siegfried Kracauer, History: The Last Things Before the Last (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969). 194.

¹³ Kracauer, History, 94.

¹⁴ Center for Bosnia Studies. https://griffinshare.fontbonne.edu/bosnia/ Accessed April 7, 2021.

¹⁵ András Riedlmayer collection on Balkan cultural heritage. https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/19/resources/6408, Accessed April 7, 2021.

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