Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
I want to begin by discussing archives that are actually on fire. On August 25, 1992, the National and University Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo was targeted by Serb nationalist forces, shelled, and set ablaze. Over three days, more than two million volumes of books, archival records, manuscripts, newspapers, maps, and journals were burned to a crisp, despite brave attempts by the people of Sarajevo to rescue them. As librarian Kemal Bakarsic described,
"The fire lasted into the next day. The sun was obscured by the smoke of books, and all over the city sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of grey ashes, floated down like a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of a text in a strange kind of black and grey negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand." [2]
Repository Citation
Caswell, Michelle. "The Archive is Not An Archives: Acknowledging the Intellectual Contributions of Archival Studies." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–20. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol16/iss1/16