“They have not been housed in an adequate fashion – something had to be done,” says British journalist and historian Chris Bennett.
He launched the Foundation for the Preservation of Historical Heritage, along with three other long-term foreign residents of Sarajevo. They aim to preserve Bosnia’s archives in digital form – before any further calamities.
Mr Bennett points out that saving the documents is a matter of more than just local concern, given the importance of events in Bosnia and its neighbours before and during World War One.
“We have all the background information here to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The investigations, contemporary press reports and the obituary in the German-language newspaper for Bosnia at that time. The focus usually tends to be on the Western front – but the war started and ended in the Balkans.”
Many of the documents salvaged from the 1992 fire are passing through a small room in the National and University Library in Sarajevo, where the Foundation has installed a simple but high-quality rig for digitising the archives.
Share don’t touch
“Skilled operators can get through 300-400 pages an hour, digitising a serious amount of material,” says British photographer Jim Marshall, another member of the Foundation.
“Delicate documents belong in a safe. The central point is that the image can be viewed and shared without having to touch the documents.”
The aim is to make the archive material available online for researchers around the world. Such systems already exist in many other places, but Bosnia remains an extremely unusual country, where completing even a simple project can be a cause for celebration.
“Co-operation is very important to us,” says Nadina Grebovic-Lendo, who is overseeing the digitisation project for the National and University Library.
“There was no financial help from the government for the preservation of our collections. So we’re finding ways to do it ourselves.”
The Foundation members are keen to mention that they could do with some funding themselves, so that they can increase their preservation efforts.
It may be too late for the material which burned last February – but perhaps there could still be a future for Bosnia’s unique reminders of the past?
By Guy De Launey
(Source: BBC)
