CASE:  THE NATIONAL AND UNIVERSITY LIBRARY OF BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
(SARAJEVO)

Five months into the siege of Sarajevo in 1992, the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina was firebombed and destroyed by Serbian nationalists. Almost all the contents of the library were destroyed, including more than 1.5 million books that included “4,000 rare books, 478 bound manuscripts, and 100 years of Bosnian newspapers and journals” [Bollag]. About 10 per cent of books (100,000) were saved by the brave Sarajevo citizens who grabbed books from the burning library and raced them through the streets to safety.

The Burnt-Out Shell of The National and University Library
Courtesy of Dubravko Kakarigi

The library immediately began rebuilding, occupying space in Bosnia’s education ministry building and cataloguing those books that had been saved. Several international projects were established to come to the aid of the library but as of now (December 2004) it appears all that work may have  been in vane.  In an email sent November 28, 2004, Jeff Spurr (director of the Bosnia Project at Harvard University) reveals that the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina recently closed.

In the email, he quotes from a major paper he gave recently where he blaims the Dayton Accords for the failure of  national institutions fluorish. Those accords, he says, which ended the war in 1995,  "[set] up a system whereby power devolved to to the cantons and municipalities. This undermined the constituency for all old national institutions and commitment to their funding; parochialism trimphed." He writes that  The National Museum in Sarajevo closeed in June, and, more recently, The National and University Library "has been forced by budgetary cuts to do the same" [Spurr email]

This must all be very disappointing for those who have worked so hard to help bring the library back from ruin. By 2003, the library had built its collection up to 400,000 books and moved into the Marshall Tito barracks, which had once housed the army. The space was already too small for the growing collection.

Several national and international organizations  provided help. Especially helpful has been the 10,000 titles shipped by the Sabre Foundation in the United States. The titles, mainly to support undergraduate course work, were donated by 21 American university presses and the Oxford University Press [Bollag].

The Bosnia Library Project began in 1996 under director Jeff Spurr. Working with the Sabre Foundation (which is based in Cambridge, MA), he helped to co-ordinate the donations from the university presses. The presses at Harvard, the University of Chicago, MIT, Princeton and Johns Hopkins each donated two copies of everything on their lists.

“The Kennedy School of Government at Harvard donated complete microfilms of the Washington Post and Boston Globe, covering the 1990s and the New York Times from 1985 to 2001, now being sent to the National and University Library.  These document the wars against Croatia and Bosnia and the Kosovo situation from the perspective of these important newspapers” [Spurr article].

Another Sabre-sponsored activity has been the ingathering project designed to locate copies of lost material in other Balkan libraries for possible copying, and a search for international scholars who at one time researched at the Sarajevo library and may have photocopied some of the rare manuscripts that have been lost.

Still another international project has attempted to reconstruct the destroyed catalogue through WorldCat [Chepesiuk].

In his email, Spurr also point out that  two of the library's staff members were sent to the NEDCC (Northeast Document Conservation Center) in Andover, Mass. a few years ago "for intensive training to maximize the new binding and conservation facility that had been donated to [the library] by the National Library of Spain."

He adds with disappointment: "A library whose doors are shut is of little more use to its community than one destroyed altogether. We can only hope that this sad situation will be remedied soon" [Spurr email]

Back		Next