The major libraries and museums in Bosnia have been bombed beyond recognition. Their contents are being painstakingly recreated with imaging technology.
Along with its thousands of people, the war in the former Yugoslavia has killed billions of printed words. Most Bosnian libraries, museums and archives were destroyed. Almost all of the country's books and manuscripts were wiped out.
The National Library in Sarajevo used to hold more than 1.5 million books and documents. In late August 1992, it was bombed with grenades for three days straight. Librarians and volunteers formed a human chain to pass books out of the burning building. They saved about 10% of the collection as well as tapes that listed some of the library's contents.
"All over the city, sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of gray ashes floated down like a dirty black snow," Dr. Kemal Bakarsic, the museum's librarian, said at the time. "Catching a page you could feel its heat and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and gray negative until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand."
Fortunately, many of the books and documents are being recovered. Although the originals have been reduced to ashes, several groups are working to restock the libraries. Some are soliciting donations of books and money.
The Bosnian Manuscripts Ingathering Project is reconstructing lost works with the help of imaging. The project is headed by Andras Riedlmayer, who directs the Documentation Center for Islamic Art and Architecture at Harvard's Fine Arts Library. They are conducting a worldwide search for Bosnian books and documents which scholars and libraries in other countries have copies. They believe they'll find a high percentage of what's been lost.
"The Oriental Institute in Sarajevo [before it was bombed] had 30 cabinets full of microfilms of manuscripts from elsewhere in Europe, the Middle East and North America," Riedlmayer says. "These microfilms had been obtained on exchange from foreign institutions and visiting scholars. The 30 cabinets and their contents perished in the flames in May 1992, along with everything else in the Institute's collection. But the very fact that they arrived as part of exchanges suggests that, scattered in academic institutions and scholars' studies outside of Bosnia, there are sufficient numbers of microfilms of Bosnian manuscripts to fill 30 cabinets. This gives us confidence that the task of reconstituting at least part of the destroyed collections is something that can and should be done."
Riedlmayer has put an electronic form on the project's Web site -- www.applicom.com/manu/ingather.htm -- asking people to describe any documents and books they have that might have been in a Bosnian library. Because many old manuscripts don't have the author's name or title, they ask people to type in the introductory and concluding paragraphs so they can be identified.
"When people holding copies of destroyed originals contact us, we find out what they have and in what format," Riedlmayer says. "We try to do this through the automated response form at our Web site. This isn't always possible, since many older scholars who hold copies are not accustomed to using the new media. Some people also work at small institutions and in countries where Internet access is limited or non-existent. In these cases, we use snail mail, the telephone, personal contacts, announcements at conferences and in scholarly journals, citation analysis, whatever it takes."
As documents come in, Riedlmayer scans them into a Hewlett Packard (Palo Alto, CA 415-857-1501) 4C scanner. He indexes and stores them on Syquest disks using Dominion Software's (Newton, MA 617-332-1144) WorkingPaper software ($100) on a Mac. The documents are OCRed in English and certain other languages using the OCR software built into WorkingPapers, which Dominion Software licenses from Minetics, a French company.
The software also has a link to Xerox's Textbridge, so this can be used if needed. The manuscripts written in Serbo-Croatian or another language WorkingPapers doesn't support, or in unusual handwriting, are archived without OCR.
Sometimes Riedlmayer sends batches of documents to Dominion Software for off-site scanning using a higher speed Fujitsu (San Jose, CA 408-432-6333) 3096 scanner. Dominion's staff put the files on Syquest disks and sends them back to Harvard.
Riedlmayer catalogs the documents using WorkingPapers' "collections" feature. This lets him store documents in groups of up to 3,200 each. They can then be searched with a word search or by filename, volume name, comments attached to the documents or pre-assigned categories -- up to six categories are used on each document.
WorkingPapers captures text as well as black and white, grayscale and color photos and other images in a proprietary file format. Once the document has been absorbed, the software can output it in TIFF format. Riedlmayer sends paper and TIFF versions of the scanned documents to his Bosnian colleagues at the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo.
"The ultimate goal is to have networked access," Riedlmayer says. "However, we're still in the early stages. The project was formally launched a little over a year ago. We're still operating on our own spare time, without outside funding or hired staff."
So far, the Project has collected:
Photos showing mosques, churches and other historic buildings in Bosnia before and after their destruction, descriptive and historical texts on these buildings and documentation on how they were destroyed and on the parties alleged to be responsible.
Copies of manuscripts from Bosnian collections. So far, 25 have been located from scholars in three countries. These haven't yet been scanned.
About 100 copies of historical documents from Bosnian collections. These haven't been scanned either.
"Our statistics of items recovered thus far may not look all that impressive, considering the enormity of what was lost when the great libraries and archives of Bosnia went up in flames," Riedlmayer says. "We are delighted at every item we succeed in rescuing from oblivion. We expect that as we attract further attention the numbers will increase. The State Archives of Naples, burned by the Nazis 45 years ago, is still working to reconstitute its collection."
The team has mixed feelings about replacing historic manuscripts with electronic files. "I am a collector of calligraphy and rare books," says Dr. Irwin Schick, a member of the team and senior research scientist at BBN, Cambridge, MA. "I'm a performance analyst and I deal with networks all day, but I still really like paper. For me creating this virtual version of the documents is something I'm doing in spite of myself. I'm not in favor of that generally. But this is one place where technology can really make a big difference."
What's next for the project? Expansion. "We hope to hire one or more people to do the correspondence, scanning and scholarly work that will make this project succeed in the long run," Riedlmayer says. "We have located some Bosnian scholars who are currently refugees in the US, employed in menial work, who could make better use of their training and talents in this project."
