Richard Ovenden's new book, "Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate
Destruction of Knowledge ... mehr
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Destruction of Knowledge ... mehr
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On Fri, Nov 20, 2020 at 4:56 PM Karl Dietz <karl.dz@gmail.com> wrote:
Richard Ovenden's new book, "Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge," is a litany of this sort of tragedy. "The preservation of information continues to be a key tool in the defense of open societies," Ovenden, who runs the Bodleian Libraries, at Oxford, writes. unesco's report "Lost Memory" is an inventory of inventories: a list of libraries and archives that were destroyed in the twentieth century, including the widespread devastations of the First and Second World Wars, the burning of some of the collections in the National Library in Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge, and the destruction of the National and University Library in Sarajevo, by the Bosnian Serb Army, in 1992. Libraries house books: copies. Archives store documents: originals. Archives cannot be replaced. As unesco's report puts it, "The loss of archives is as serious as the loss of memory in a human being."
