Special Collections & the Libraries Destroyed in Sarajevo

What Librarians Think

SOC Student Panel
Spring 2021

Link to Materials at GitHub
George Mason University
Cultural Studies Department

Mark Edwin Peterson

manuscripts

Background

Bosnian War 1992-95

Historic architecture and cultural collections destroyed as a form of genocide.

1200 mosques
150 churches
4 synagogues
1000 monuments

Libraries in Sarajevo destroyed by shelling in 1992.

National & University Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina
1.5m volumes | 155,000 rarities

Oriental Institute in Sarajevo
5,263 manuscripts | 7,000 Ottoman documents

Librarians around the world were shocked.

manuscripts

The Heritage of

Written Culture

Collections have become wartime targets.
Written manuscripts & records especially vulnerable.
Few protectors:
IFLA | UNESCO

blueshield

Uncertainty

in Special Collections

Legacies of Exclusion

Fragility of Collections
Need for Planning
Need for Digitization
Difficulty of Recovery

How Do Libraries Deal with

Absence and Loss?

dispossessed

Absence

  1. Creating
  2. Harvesting
  3. Collecting:
    • New sources
    • Purchasing
    • Digital

ovenden

Loss

Reconstruction
Recovery
Digital Recovery
New Directions

All lead to

reduced collections

Goals of Special Collections

Brand Marketing
Aura
Primary Source Literacy
Prestige
Control of the Sources
Digital Prestige
Archives Literacy

Focus on the Institution

tweet

clear difference between teaching & research

The Data on Librarian Sentiment

Twitter
Self description
Holdings in specific collections

Compiling the Twitter Data

114 tweets on selected terms since start of 2007
c. 1% of the tweets from 64 accounts
4 librarians, major collections, libraries near Sarajevans
“Islamic Manuscripts” by far largest topic
Search for specific terms was a weak approach

bubblelines

Judging Sentiment


Some terms had few results
Tweets coded for sentiment
Qualitative data processing
Used weighted analysis

Sentiment from About Pages

manuscripts

More support for the idea that librarians remain focused on their own institutions and immediate users.

Focused Responses from

Special Collections

  1. Sarajevans of today
    • Center for Bosnian Studies at Fontbonne
  2. Recovery
    • Balkan Cultural Heritage Collection at Harvard
  3. Accountability
    • Human Rights Archive at Duke

tweet

Institutions

and the Fate of

Written Heritage

Increasing access & volume tricks us into thinking that data is forever and paper is safe.

Thanks!


More understandable updates will be posted at my Sarajevo page on my student site.

markedwinpeterson.com