University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

"Stuff Happens": A Brief Overview of the 2003 Destruction of Iraqi Manuscript Collections, Archives, and Libraries

Al-Tikriti, Nabil

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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/3697

Description

Title
"Stuff Happens": A Brief Overview of the 2003 Destruction of Iraqi Manuscript Collections, Archives, and Libraries
Author(s)
Al-Tikriti, Nabil
Issue Date
2007
Keyword(s)
  • Libraries and society
  • Iraq
  • Iraqi Libraries
Abstract
On March 20, 2003, military forces of the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia invaded Iraq. In the course of this invasion and subsequent occupation, Iraq’s cultural infrastructure suffered a great deal of destruction. While international attention has focused primarily on the immense destruction done to the country’s pre- Islamic archaeological assets, domestic Iraqi attention has focused equally on the losses suffered by the country’s manuscript collections, archives, and document collections. This article provides a general overview of the latter category, including a brief discussion of the events involved, damages sustained, and current status of the collections in question. While in certain key cases the damage sustained by collections was not as severe as initially reported, there were significant losses and a great deal of work lies ahead to reconstitute the facilities involved.
Publisher
Graduate School of Library and Information Science. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
ISSN
0024-2594
Type of Resource
text
Language
en
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/2142/3697
Copyright and License Information
Copyright 2007 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois.

Owning Collections

Library Trends 55 (3) Winter 2007: Libraries in Times of War, Revolution, and Social Change PRIMARY
Library Trends 55 (3) Winter 2007: Libraries in Times of War, Revolution, and Social Change. Edited by W. Boyd Rayward and Christine Jenkins.