da blog

On December 8th I was invited by Dr Saad Eskander, the Director of the National Library and Archives of Iraq, as his guest to an awards ceremony he was having at the British Library.

The story behind this is that in 2006 I met him in Abu Dhabi speaking about his work and I subsequently asked him to write a blog for our community of archivists and librarians about his day to day life. This blog was picked up by almost all main stream press around the world. Here is an article about him in the International Herald Tribune. In an interview with Fran Monks (in her website on How to make a difference ) Saad spoke about how through his own free will he decided to return to his home city of Baghdad in 2003 after 23 years of absence, of which 13 had been spent as an academic in the UK. After Sadaam had been removed, Saad and a group of Iraqi artists, writers and academics from the UK returned to their country to see what they could do. All of the group except for Saad returned to London almost immediately because they were so shocked by the security situation. Saad alone was prepared to risk his life in order to assist with the rebuilding of the nation that he loves. Saad believes that the future of Iraq and Baghdad must be non-sectarian and democratic and have equal rights for all citizens, including women. This he practises in the Library which he has restored. Saad described his shock on first seeing the library: “95% of the contents had been either destroyed or looted. Everything had been burnt and even the marble had melted. Everything was covered in soot and the stench was almost unbearable.”

At the dinner after the ceremony were many of the great and the good from UK with specialities in the Middle East. I was an incongruous figure among them…as this obviously does not include me…I also sat beside Ann Clwyd who is a Welsh MP and Gordon Browns’ special envoy on Human Rights in Iraq. A lot of interest in the digital preservation training we do here and also the potential of VLEs being developed to facilitate learning in this area. It is seen as priority for the INLA to learn about how to manage their digital surrogates as their collections of archives is largely made up of these surrogates from the British Library as well as other places.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.