Hello all,
while the title of the article may be unwieldy, the rest is compelling.
Best,
Jennifer Harris
Mount Allison University
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Today's war puts halt to work on saving yesterday for tomorrow
Director says restoration of national library is on hold
By Nour Samaha
Daily Star staff
Friday, July 28, 2006
BEIRUT: When explosions rang out at Beirut Port on July 15, more than
Lebanon's economic life fell into peril: Beirut Port is the storage site of
the Lebanese National Library.
Nonetheless, for the time being at least, Lebanese concerned about their
national patrimony can breathe easy.
"First," said Gereard Khajerian, director of the National Library
Reconstruction Project, "the bombs which hit the port were far from the Free
Zone building, where the books for the National Library are kept. There have
been no problems there until now.
"When the Free Zone building closed, our workshops and the deposit area of the
books closed too," he told The Daily Star. "But we've made several visits to
the place, and have seen that there are no problems, and no damage either."
The National Library collection has had more than its share of travails. The
library shut when the Lebanese Civil War broke out in 1975, and the books were
put into storage.
"[The books] have suffered because the storage conditions weren't ideal,"
said Khajerian. "When we took charge of them, there was a lot of dust, and a
few books had disintegrated. But we have worked well on these, and have
improved our system of storage."
European assistance made the post-Civil War restoration program possible.
"One of the missions was to collect the books ... and put them on the
shelves," he explained. "All the books we received were in very bad shape.
We've had to do extremely necessary restoration. This restoration was the
biggest task we have had to do.
"Secondly, we had to do an inventory, and some of these books need
restoration," Khajerian said. "We have a team working specifically in this
area. This has taken several years.
"We've saved the 115,000 items that make up our collection, and we're in the
process of restoring 380 to 400,000 newspapers and other similar collections
for the archives."
Lebanon's National Library collection is an historically valuable one, he
said: "Those under our authority now are books which have been accumulated
from the 15th century, from several individual collections. Since 1920, we
received a massive amount from private donations, which encouraged us to
create a small development program."
One of the reasons most Lebanese know little about their National Library is
that there is not yet a serviceable building where the collection can be
publicly accessed.
Before the current hostilities began, a new space was being prepared to house
the collection. The library's new space will be the Sanayeh Building, an
Ottoman-era structure across from the Sanayeh Gardens, formerly the base of
the Lebanese University's Faculty of Law.
"The emir of Qatar ... has promised to make a convention with us with regards
to the books," said Khajerian, "not only to continue with our work, but to
physically raise the National Library. He will donate the funds to rebuild
this place and restore the books."
"At the moment all activity has been suspended, as there are several people
from our team who can't leave their villages, and therefore cannot come to
Beirut," he said. "But hopefully, by next week we can begin our restoration
again. This will definitely go ahead after the war, because once it is
finished, when the infrastructure is being rebuilt, the National Library will
also be a priority."
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?
edition_id=1&categ_id=2&article_id=74316