Harvard To Aid Libraries In Iraq

In an effort to restore order to Iraq’s war-torn libraries, Harvard will participate in an initiative to train Iraqi librarians to modernize their holdings and their cataloguing methods, according to an announcement Thursday.

With a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Harvard University Library (HUL) will partner with the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science in an attempt to reverse the effects of a decade of war and economic sanctions, as well as looting that accompanied the recent regime change.

Representatives from Simmons and HUL will meet with Iraqi librarians this May in Amman, Jordan to discuss specific plans for program. Over the course of the next two years, Iraqi librarians will be trained in new methods of preservation, collection development, management and online information systems.

Although he could not be reached for comment this weekend, Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the University Library Sidney Verba ’53 said in the Simmons press release Thursday that “librarians from Harvard will play a critical role in the Iraqi program.”

According to Ahmed al-Rahim, Harvard’s preceptor in Arabic, tight restrictions on the availability of books and scholarly journals imposed on Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s 25-year regime, especially since the last Gulf War, prevented Iraqi academics from keeping up with developments in their fields.

“One thing [that has been] discussed after the fall of Baghdad was that there was a lot of money that was taken from the Oil For Food program—money that Saddam and his cronies pocketed,” he said. “That impacted the education system and libraries as well. There was no money for books and academic journals.”

Omar al-Dewachi, an Iraqi medical school graduate who is now pursuing a doctorate in anthropology at Harvard, said academic resources in Iraq had stagnated because of sanctions and censorship in Saddam Hussein’s regime.

“Everything in the libraries did not go beyond 1988,” said al-Dewachi, who fled from Iraq to Lebanon in 1998. “Our textbooks were very, very old. The library was not a place where one could do that much. I used it maybe twice.”

Michele Cloonan, dean of the Simmons’ library sciences school and the principal investigator for the NEH grant, said in the press release that “the recent war has resulted in widespread destruction. Librarians were cut off from technological and professional development...so much has changed in library and information science since the Iran/Iraq war two decades ago.”

Al-Rahim said that the biggest contribution Harvard could make is to donate duplicate books to universities in Iraq, and to organize an exchange program for Iraqi and American librarians.

Cloonan was out of the country and was unavailable for comment.

It is unclear whether the NEH program will be sending American librarians to Iraq. The Simmons press release stated that “Simmons faculty will teach graduate library courses for Iraqi librarians...and serve as long-term mentors via the Internet.”

Officials from Harvard and the NEH were also unavailable for comment this weekend. According to HUL spokesperson Peter Kosewski, the University has been asked by NEH to hold off on public discussion of the program until later this week.

Al-Rahim, who said Friday that he had not yet heard of the planned initiative, added that Iraqi libraries need to be made more “user friendly” and conducive to foreign academic research.

“For a long time, Western academics have not been able to go to Iraq,” he said. “Many of them decided to study in Syria or Egypt instead—countries which have been easier to get into for research. Iraq has been completely closed.”

Iraqi manuscripts would be priceless resources to Western researchers, according to al-Rahim, if they were made available and properly catalogued.

Al-Dewachi, who has not been back to his homeland since 1998, said he thought there was a “thirst in Iraq right now for exposure to the outside world.” “It’s a place that’s been decapitated from the international community,” he said.

Al-Rahim returned from a conference in Baghdad on civics and education last Sunday, where he toured some of the city’s functioning libraries.

“Books are a little bit sparse,” he said of the library in the University of Baghdad’s Women’s College. “There was a reference room with some basic works in literature in the humanities library, but there’s a great need for books of all kinds—particularly in English as there’s a tremendous demand right now to learn English and to read or be published in it.”

Other libraries, he said, did not survive war-time pillaging.

“One of the libraries in the center of Baghdad was completely looted and burned,” he said. “There were many manuscripts lost there. It’s very sad and devastating to look at this building, previously a library, which is now just a burned out black shell. For someone who loves books, it’s a very difficult thing to see.”

Al-Rahim said he visited several bookstores while in Iraq, including the outdoor vendors on al-Mutanabbi Street, where the sidewalks are lined with collections of used volumes.

“Many of them had the covers or the title pages ripped off,” he said. “Some of them you could see that they were part of a library because they had official stamps on them. They were being sold out for 250 dinars, which is about 20 cents a book.”

Al-Rahim said that the books had clearly been looted from a library and disfigured in such a way that their origins were untraceable.

Such widespread looting has been happening since the first Gulf War, said al-Rahim, who while visiting one bookstore came across an entire storeroom of volumes that he said were stolen from the University of Kuwait library in the 1990s.

“If the Iraqi police were organized or interested, they could seize them back, but books are one of the lowest priorities right now on the police agenda,” he said.

Although he attributed the rampant theft to a failure on the military’s part to secure academic institutions, al-Rahim said that Iraqi customs and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security have been doing “quite a bit” to retrieve the items.

“What you need is people who know these books and who can identify them and take them back for the library,” he said.

—Staff writer Leon Neyfakh at neyfakh@fas.harvard.edu.