Robert-Goldwater-Library

Goldwater Library débuts photo sharing group

The Goldwater Library is pleased to announce its contribution to community-based photo sharing, Metropolitan Museum: Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.

If you're reading this post, chances are you're already familiar with flickr, one of several social networking photo sharing tools on the Internet. The 'sharing' in photo sharing comes not only from adding photographs to the Internet for all to see. It also comes from contributing to other people's photos with notes, comments, and keywords or phrases, known as 'tags'.

Albums (or 'sets' in flickr parlance) allow any member-contributors to assemble photographs by theme, event, or whatever concept they choose. Similarly members can create a collective album, known as a 'group' or 'pool', to take advantage of other people's photographs by likewise gathering them under a single banner. It's this 'pool' concept that we're taking advantage of, a gathering together photos taken by visitors to the AAOA galleries -- the objects, the installation, the visitors, in short, the entire experience.

New Yorker cover by Bruce McCall, Mar. 5, 2007

An article some months back in Artnet reblogged in this space got us thinking about differences in the approach taken by art museums toward photography in their galleries. Art museums have had policies governing the taking of photographs in their galleries since indoor photography first became practical. And when it comes to publishing photographs of museum objects, museums have created a cottage industry in selling rights and reproductions of objects in their collections.

But the pervasiveness of digital photography and photo sharing websites (such as flickr) has significantly altered the equation. There's scarcely anywhere impervious to digital photo documentation. Family photographs, once relegated to shoe boxes or dusty albums, can now not only be readily retrieved but also relentless shared with everyone. In effect, the personal becomes not just public but universal. And amateur photography taken inside museums have long been a staple of travel albums.

But why this particular project and why now?

 

Timbuktu digital library project

From the NY Times, 8/7/2007

A copy of the Koran from the 12th century. According to notes in the text, it was bought for a Moroccan king for a sum of gold. (Candace Feit for The New York Times)

Timbuktu Hopes Ancient Texts Spark a Revival
by LYDIA POLGREEN

TIMBUKTU, Mali — Ismaël Diadié Haïdara held a treasure in his slender fingers that has somehow endured through 11 generations — a square of battered leather enclosing a history of the two branches of his family, one side reaching back to the Visigoths in Spain and the other to the ancient origins of the Songhai emperors who ruled this city at its zenith.

“This is our family’s story,” he said, carefully leafing through the unbound pages. “It was written in 1519.”

Photo source >
The musty collection of fragile, crumbling pages, written in the florid Arabic script of the sixteenth century, is also this once forgotten outpost’s future.

A surge of interest in ancient books, hidden for centuries in houses along Timbuktu’s dusty streets and in leather trunks in nomad camps, is raising hopes that Timbuktu — a city whose name has become a staccato synonym for nowhere — may once again claim a place at the intellectual heart of Africa.

“I am a historian,” Mr. Haïdara said. “I know from my research that great cities seldom get a second chance. Yet here we have a second chance because we held on to our past.”

This ancient city, a prisoner of the relentless sands of the Sahara and a changing world that prized access to the sea over the grooves worn by camel hooves across the dunes, is on the verge of a renaissance.

“We want to build an Alexandria for black Africa,” said Mohamed Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba Institute, a government-run library in Timbuktu. “This is our chance to regain our place in history.”

The South African government is building a new library for the institute, a state-of-the-art facility that will house, catalog and digitize tens of thousands of books and make their contents available, many for the first time, to researchers. Charities and governments from Europe, the United States and the Middle East have poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the city’s musty family libraries, which are being expanded and transformed into research institutions, drawing scholars from around the world eager to translate and interpret the long forgotten manuscripts.

The Libyan government is planning to transform a dingy 40-room hotel into a luxurious 100-room resort, complete with Timbuktu’s only swimming pool and space to hold academic and religious conferences. Libya is also digging a new canal that will bring the Niger River to the edge of Timbuktu.

Timbuktu’s new seekers have a variety of motives. South Africa and Libya are vying for influence on the African stage, each promoting its vision of a resurgent Africa. Spain has direct links to some of the history stored here, while American charities began giving money after Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor of African studies, featured the manuscripts in a television documentary series in the late 1990s.

This new chapter in the story of Timbuktu, whose fortunes fell in the twilight of the Middle Ages, is almost as extraordinary as those that preceded it ... [Read more]

• Library of Congress online exhibition of Malian manuscripts from Timbuktu
• Timbuktu Manuscript Project (University of Oslo Centre for Development and the Environment)
  • Visit the Timbuktu Libraries
• Search WATSONLINE

Digital Library of Scholarly Resources on Africa

The Summer 2007 issue of African Arts includes a 'first word' column on a promising new online scholarly research resource for Africa. This resource first came to the library's attention in early April, when Aluka announced the roll out of its cultural heritage site component.

[A future post will review the resource and give tips on navigation]

Aluka is "an international, collaborative initiative [to build] an online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa," according to the project's History and Mission page.

Aluka seeks to attract high-quality scholarly content about Africa from institutions and individuals across the globe ... By aggregating these materials online, the Aluka collections link materials that are widely dispersed and difficult to access, opening up new opportunities for research, teaching, and broader public discussion. One of Aluka’s primary objectives is to provide African scholars and students with access to scholarly materials originally from Africa, but now out of their reach.

Aluka is a project of Ithaka, a not-for-profit organization formed “to accelerate the adoption of productive and efficient uses of information technology for the benefit of the worldwide scholarly community.”  Aluka is affiliated with both JSTOR and ARTstor. Work began on Aluka in early 2003.

Aluka's target audience is primarily the "higher education and research community," with most resources selected and pitched to undergraduate students and their instructors. Some resources may have particular application to specialized researchers.

Access to Aluka is open to "any educational, research, cultural, or other not-for-profit organization that joins Aluka by signing a participation agreement." Outside of Africa a fee is involved. During the 'Preview Period' any institution with access to JSTOR (including this one) has free access to Aluka content. (There is no indication how long the Preview period will last.) The Preview period will end December 31, 2007.

In addition to the content areas themselves, additional pages highlight Featured Collections (for instance, the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies) and a running list of Latest Additions. There is also an FAQ Page.

At the moment Aluka presents three constantly expanding 'content areas':

• Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa "consists of more than 180,000 pages of documents and images, including periodicals, nationalist publications, records of colonial government commissions, local newspaper reports, personal papers, correspondence, UN documents, out-of-print and other particularly relevant books, oral testimonies, life histories, and speeches" reflecting the history of the struggle itself: "colonial rule, dispersion of exiles, international intervention, and worldwide networks that supported successive generations of resistance within the region."

• African Plants "comprises scientific data contributed by the African Plants Initiative (API) ... API's long-term goal is to build a comprehensive online research tool aggregating and linking presently scattered scholarly resources about African plants, thereby dramatically improving access for students, scholars, and scientists around the globe."

• African Cultural Heritage Sites and Landscapes "content area links high-quality visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage sites.The digital library includes photographs, 3D models, GIS data, site plans, aerial and satellite photography, images of rock art, excavation reports, manuscripts, traveler's accounts, historical and antiquarian maps, books, articles, and other scholarly research." [N.B.: Until June 30, 2007, downloading of the the datasets for three-dimensional site models, GIS data, and digital video has been disabled.]

It is this last collection which has the potential to provide the most valuable information for our research community. The collection is organized around what Aluka calls a "cultural landscape." As of April 2007 five cultural landscapes had been identified: Kilwa Kisiwani—a medieval city on an off-shore island in Tanzania; Lalibela, Ethiopia—capital of the Zagwe Dynasty and famous for its rock-hewn churches; The Asante Temples at Besease and Patakro, Ghana; Djenné and Timbuktu, Mali, celebrated for mosques in Sudanic style; and a preliminary collection of digitized photographs of African Rock Art. Future landscapes will include the stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe; the stelae field at Axum, Ethiopia; Elmina, Ghana; Lamu archipelago located on Kenya's northern coast; and five rock art shelters and caves in South Africa’s Cederberg Mountains.

Each of these cultural landscape areas "includes a vast range of visual and textual materials ... [including] high-resolution, metrically accurate digital photographs, two-dimensional site plans, three-dimensional models of structures, towns, and landscapes, spatial/geographic information systems (GIS), digital video and panoramas of the sites, and in the future, computer visualizations with walk-through capabilities.

"Related contextual materials ... include, for example, a selection of digitized scholarly articles, monographs, and travelogues from the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University; some antiquarian maps of Africa from the Afriterra Free Cartographic Library; selections of narratives, drawings, and documents of and by the |xam and !kun people of southern Africa as collected in the 19th century by Lucy Lloyd and Wilhelm Bleek; and a unique collection of field notes and images from excavations at Kilwa Kisiwani carried out during the 1960s and early 1970s by Neville Chittick, the first Director of the British Institute in Eastern Africa."

A Schomburg Renaissance

Ruby Washington/The New York Times

A 1925 sign from the New York Public Library’s Negro division.

via the NY Times:

Harlem’s Cultural Anchor in a Sea of Ideas
By FELICIA R. LEE
Published: May 11, 2007

YOU could almost see the ghosts among the new furniture and modern recessed lighting. It was a few days before the staff at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, at 135th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem, finished hanging two exhibitions and stripping the paper off the doors at its bigger, brighter new entrance. Amid the sounds of hammers and drills, they prepared for tomorrow’s public celebration of the center’s two-year, $11 million renovation.

The Schomburg is as much a monument to an idea as it is a building. So those ghosts, workaday and luminous, inhabit a space of many incarnations, tracing its roots back to the 135th Street New York Public Library branch that opened there in 1905. Predominantly Jewish then, Harlem was mostly black by 1924. Over the years, Alex Haley researched “Roots” at the Schomburg; James Baldwin and Gordon Parks both found it a refuge; a young Ossie Davis honed his craft there.

By the time it officially became the Schomburg in 1972, taking its name from Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, the Puerto Rican-born black bibliophile who donated his collection, it was a one-stop connection with the global black experience. Its wonders include a rare recording of a Marcus Garvey speech, documents signed by Toussaint L’Ouverture, a signed first edition of Phillis Wheatley’s poetry, daguerreotypes of African-Americans from the 1830s, Benjamin Banneker’s almanacs. Its exhibitions have tracked black migration and displayed the contents of Malcolm X’s pocket when he was gunned down at the Audubon Ballroom.

“The center has increasingly become one of the cultural anchors of the greater Harlem community, one of the top three tourist destinations, along with the Apollo and the Studio Museum in Harlem,” said Howard Dodson, the Schomburg director. “The kind of change that’s taking place in Harlem is of political, social and historical interest to the center, and we’ll be here to document it. We are not going anywhere.”

As the Schomburg unveils its facelift, Harlem itself is also undergoing one of its periodic renaissances. There’s new real estate development, new stores and restaurants, new places to imbibe culture. The association with Harlem has been the constant for the Schomburg trove of more than five million items: art, manuscripts, films, photographs. The center has been a place for community meetings and for local politicians, for schoolchildren and eminent researchers like the historian John Hope Franklin.

Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum, is among those who see the renovated Schomburg as an emblem of a Harlem at the top of its game. Hundreds of thousands of tourists pour into Harlem annually to shop in the stores on 125th Street, sit in the pews of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church or revel in the serendipity of finding new cafes or dowager buildings.

“The Schomburg stands as a bearer of the idea that our history and culture are important,” said Ms. Golden, who is African-American. “The renovation will reinvent the sense of the institution as living, breathing space. All the cultural institutions in Harlem are going through a period of incredible growth, and it’s not just about physical renovation.”

A walk through Harlem makes vivid its embrace of many worlds. There are the tiny African braiding shops, mom-and-pop restaurants with an African or Caribbean flavor, as well as Citarella and Starbucks amid the cacophony of 125th Street, the area’s commercial spine. It is dotted with stores like Old Navy, as well as the Apollo and the Studio Museum. The streets are cleaner and safer than they have been in years. (read on ...)

And take note of the following:

Two exhibitions will be on view through Oct. 28: “Stereotypes vs. Humantypes: Images of Blacks in the 19th and 20th Centuries” and “Black Art: Treasures From the Schomburg.”

The “Stereotypes” exhibition is meant to show the prevalence of caricatured images of blacks for most of the early 19th and early 20 centuries. It uses items like sheet music, posters, advertisements and postcards to show how words like “darktown” and “coon” were casual companions to depictions of blacks with distorted features.

Some of the items are on loan from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Mich.

“A small amount of this is from the South,” Mr. Dodson noted. “A significant amount of the stereotypical ads come from New York.”

The propaganda is contrasted with real-life black images from that period: couples in their wedding finery, 1920s bathing beauties, formal banquets.

“Black Treasures” is an eclectic display that includes the 1868 marble and bronze “Portrait of Ira Aldridge as Othello,” by Pietro Calvi, as well as the 1969 collage “Black Manhattan,” by Romare Bearden, and dozens of other work by Elizabeth Catlett, Augusta Savage, Jacob Lawrence, Benny Andrews, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Horace Pippin, Faith Ringgold and others.

   

South African Music Digital Archive

via Bring 'n Braai:

African music samples latest donation to the commons
Posted by Daniela on April 11th, 2007 filed in SA Free Culture Tour, Music

Another donation to the South African digital archive, being collected through Bring 'n Braai and the Free Music Project, is one which will be an incredible resource for children who will be using the One Laptop per Child computer. This donation is from ccMixter South Africa, and consists of the samples that were used for the SAfro-Brazil Remix competition.

Rebecca Kahn, ccMixter SA's resident blogger, explained more about the samples:

"The International Library of African Music (ILAM) at Rhodes University and Anthony Caplan both created samples using traditional instruments such as the mutumba drums and the umrhube mouth bow. The mutumba drums are originallly from Zimbabwe and are used to accompany spiritual ceremonies that include dancing, singing, clapping and playing the mbira thumb piano. The ILAM have used these drums in a sample which you can hear here.

The umrhube mouth bow is a Xhosa mouth-resonated friction bow, and has been used by Anthony Caplan by using whistling techniques of Xhosa origin, as well as tapping the string in the style of similar instruments found around southern Africa, rather than 'bowing' the string as the Xhosa people do. Check out Anthony’s sample, Umrhube Gees here.

The Kundi harp, which has been used in an ILAM sample that you can hear here, is a five-string harp from Central Africa. It is an instrument traditionally played by young men and boys."

As Rebecca said in her blog entry, it is often difficult to find information or audio clips of these instruments on the internet. And if one does find this type of material, it's usually marked with a big 'all rights reserved' sign. So to have these samples made available on the web, as well as under a CC licence, is truly an invaluable resource. Even more so, these samples will now not only be used to stimulate the talent of our South African remixers, but will also be made available to open the minds of children around the world to the sounds of Africa. And who knows when the next Miriam Makeba or Hugh Masekela will be inspired to start making beautiful music?

Museums + folksonomies: bridging the semantic gap

via NYTimes:
One Picture, 1,000 Tags {excerpts}
By PAMELA LiCALZI O’CONNELL
Published: March 28, 2007

[...]

"Museums have recognized that their online collections are not doing the job — we're hiding the content away from nonspecialists," said Jennifer Trant, a partner at Archives and Museum Informatics in Toronto. "We've got to provide access on the same level as visual memory."

Now, after spending millions of dollars and years of effort on their virtual homes — which draw many more visitors than their physical ones — museums are rethinking their online collections. They are experimenting with one of the hottest Web 2.0 trends: tagging, the basis for popular sites like Flickr.com. In social tagging, users of a service provide the tags, or labels, that describe the content (of photos, Web links, art), thus creating a user-generated taxonomy, or folksonomy, as it's called.

Museums plan to encourage the public to annotate their collections by supplying descriptive tags that could exist alongside professional documentation, creating a new shared vocabulary. Van Gogh's "Starry Night," for example, could elicit tags like "stars," "planets," "swirls" or "insanity."

The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution and the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia, already have prototype tagging applications on their Web sites, and nearly a dozen other museums plan similar projects.

But can the public be trusted to tag art? Will curators let them?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art ran a test in fall 2005 in which volunteers supplied keywords for 30 images of paintings, sculpture and other artwork. The tags were compared with the museum's curatorial catalog, and more than 80 percent of the terms were not in the museum's documentation. Joachim Friess's ornate sculpture "Diana and the Stag," for example, was tagged with the expected "antler," "archery" and "huntress." But it was also tagged "precious" and "luxury."

"The results were staggering," said Susan Chun, general manager for collections information planning at the Met. "There's a huge semantic gap between museums and the public."

Based on this and other research, a group of museums formed the steve.museum tagging project, which recently received a two-year grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The grant work, which began last fall, is based at the Met and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and includes the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. People may tag selected art from these museums on the project Web site; some of the museums plan applications on their own sites as well.

[...] Aside from the prohibitive cost of subject indexing thousands of works, there are other reasons museums want the public to tag art. For one, "art professionals can find it surprisingly difficult to describe the visual elements of a picture," said Ms. Trant, who is managing the grant work. She recalled that during early testing of tagging at the Met, a frustrated curator complained, "Everything I know isn't in the picture." [read on...]

iMoMA: Virtually Phlogging the Museum

via Artnet News, Feb 8, 2007:

DIGITAL CAMERA WOES AT MUSEUMS
Digital cameras and cell phones are playing havoc with the "Photos Not Allowed" policy at museums, according to a recent article by Ruth Graham in the New York Sun. Museums typically fret that if their visitors take snapshots of artworks on the walls, important "intellectual property rights" are being violated -- though cynics have long suspected that the museums just want to protect their monopoly on postcards and reproductions. These days, images of any popular art project can usually be found on photo-sharing sites like Flickr.

Now, pushing things one step further, comes the iMoMA Project by Travis and Brady Hammond, which aggregates all the Flickr images taken at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The project has special pages for celebrated MoMA works like Claude Monet’s Water Lilies, Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk and Andy Warhol's Soup Cans, as well as the Yoshio Taniguchi-designed stairwell. Featuring snaps from all angles and under a variety lighting conditions, the project is a veritable phenomenology of the works. Hammond told the Sun that he hopes MoMA will embrace the idea, and feature their project in the museum itself, perhaps as "a little kiosk." How about putting it on www.moma.org? The project would provide a head-spinning mise en abyme on the web!

On the left coast, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has been aggressively enforcing its "No Photos" policy in its current "René Magritte and Contemporary Art" blockbuster. According to BoingBoing, a tech blog, LACMA guards are being forced to leap into action whenever a museum visitor takes a cell phone from his or her pocket. (The guards are also required to wear Magrittean bowler hats!) BoingBoing particularly savored the irony of a show that blocks ordinary people from participating in the very proliferation of Magrittean imagery that the show itself celebrates.

As with other attempts to stop the sharing of digital content, any attempt to curtail the circulation of digital images is a fool's errand. As of this posting, dozens of photos of the "Magritte and Contemporary Art" have been posted on Flickr, including numerous snaps of artworks.

Links:

iMoMA home

About iMoMA

How to contribute

iMoMA's flickr group: theMoMAproject(NYC)

Conference on Pacific Island Material Culture Documentation

This conference seeks to bring attention to Pacific collection materials that are not well known but that have special value to Pacific communities and to the general public. It also seeks to focus attention on issues and developments regarding access to these materials, as well as to digitizing projects underway. An international group of Pacific librarians will share information about their collections and discuss common concerns.

The keynote speaker for the conference is award-winning poet, author, and former librarian Robert Sullivan, a UHM assistant professor of English. Other featured speakers include David Kukutai Jones, Maori specialist at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand; and Ewan Maidment, Executive Officer of the Pacific Manuscripts Bureau, Canberra, Australia. The conference convener is Dr Karen Peacock, UHM Pacific curator and head of Special Collections.

Conference registration information is on the Web. Registration is $20 general and $5 students. The registration deadline is 1 March 2007.

The conference is sponsored by the UHM Center for Pacific Islands Studies through a US DOE Title VI National Resource Center Grant. It is also supported by the UHM library system.

For more information, contact CPIS outreach coordinator, Tisha Hickson, at ctisha@hawaii.edu. For program information, contact Karen Peacock, at peacock@hawaii.edu.

When Blobgects Are the Object...

reblogged via Material World, February 7, 2007:

Blobgects: an Experiment in the Discursive Museum

"By situating a catalogue, the definitive universal description, into a discursive idiom, the Weblog, we are drawing attention to the fact that this is but one way of narrating these objects. Through the ability of users to tag, comment, and order these accounts in their way, we hope that the provisional and local nature of the catalogue itself will become clear."

The Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology at the University of Cambridge has a new weblog: http://museum.archanth.cam.ac.uk/blobgects/

I grant you that this is not particularly earthshaking, but this Blog is a little different. It is only a little different, and that is the point. Though it is a weblog, the entries are not curatorial statements, nor academic discourses, nor even the contributions from the public -- they are objects. Or, rather, they are the catalogue entries and, eventually, the images of objects.

The goal of Blobgects is simple, What might happen if rather than just being able to search a museum's on-line catalogue, and being forced into the idiom of the catalogue, users could engage with the catalogue as they would a Blog? Engagement that would include all the features of a Blog: commenting, tagging, RSS feeds of individual records or searches, etc. In other words, what might happen if we extended the principles of Social Computing, in one small way, into the privileged world of the museum catalogue? Hence, Blobgects.

I imagine that I do not have to state on this forum that knowledge is embodied, it is situated and requires sets of social relations between people. However, I feel that I do have to state, or restate, that knowledge also requires things. Just like people, things are not outside of knowledge but are part of its embodiment. It is true that you cannot have knowledge with just things, things are not knowledge, but knowledge is not simply conceptual -- I would argue that it is not conceptual at all, but that is another matter. Objects, even digital objects, embody surrogate practices, surrogate social practices. They do this so they can be knowledge objects, or, more accurately, can participate in situated knowledge production and reproduction.

So why Blobgects? [read full article]

Diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraq National Library and Archive

Photo: Gleb Garanich/Reuters
The looted and burned National Library and Archive in Baghdad in April 2003, a week after United States forces seized the capital.

via NYTimes:

Baghdad Day to Day: Librarian's Journal
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: February 7, 2007

Saad Eskander, the director of  Iraq's National Library and Archive in Baghdad, finally had some time to catch up on his diary after a couple of very busy weeks. As he wrote in his latest entry, he was having trouble repairing the Internet system; the Restoration Laboratory "was hit by 5 bullets"; and "another librarian, who works at the Periodical Department, received a death threat. He has to leave his house and look for another one, as soon as he can; otherwise, he will be murdered."

For a month now, Dr. Eskander's intermittent diary entries have been appearing on the Web site of the British Library (bl.uk/iraqdiary.html), and they detail the daily hurdles of keeping Iraq's central library open, preserving the surviving archives and books and, oh yes, staying alive.

"We thought it would be a good opportunity to highlight the conditions Dr. Eskander and his staff are really facing and that they are risking their lives to provide this service," said Catriona Finlayson, a spokeswoman for the British Library.

Written in a flat, unemotional style, the entries relate the bombings, blockades, shootings, threats, shortages and petty frustrations that make up everyday life for the cadre of civil servants working at Iraq’s main cultural and literary storehouse. A complaint that heating fuel prices are 40 times higher than in the fall is followed by a report on the assassination of one of the library’s bright young Web designers and the need to ask the government to keep the electricity on.

Dr. Eskander said that a friend who works at the National Archives in Britain suggested he write a diary for an archivists’ Web site. "I was hesitant," he wrote in an e-mail exchange yesterday. "I feared that people would not believe what I would say about our daily life and the state of total chaos and destruction prevailing in Baghdad."

Finally, he agreed, because "I was in debt to my librarians and archivists, who have been working very hard and making all sorts of sacrifices to serve the cultural needs of the educated class of the country."

The British Library started publishing his journal on Dec. 30, the day of Saddam Hussein's execution. It includes material beginning in mid-November, right before Dr. Eskander decided to close his library for three weeks after a frightening series of bombings, shootings and death threats. The mostly unedited entries retain their typos, missing words and mistakes in English, contributing to a sense of immediacy and intimacy.