Bosnians endured a devastating loss when their country's National and University Library in Sarajevo went down in flames as a result of a Serbian Nationalist attack in 1992.
The tragedy left the library not only without books, but also lacking the proper records needed to enumerate the destruction.
The University's Working Group on Southeastern European Studies adopted the responsibility of creating a bibliography of more than 2,700 holdings for the Sarajevo library.
"There is no reason to intentionally destroy a library in the name of anything," said Janet Crayne, one of the two faculty members who compiled the bibliography. "Libraries are cultural institutions and to destroy a library is to destroy culture."
Crayne, an associate librarian in the University Library's Slavic Division, said the University has an obligation to aid the Sarajevo library.
"Our libraries have professional relations with their library," Crayne said.
The project began with initial discussion in the fall of 1994 when Enes Kujundzic, director of the National and University Library in Sarajevo, visited campus. Kujundzic said the formation of a bibliography would be necessary to rebuild the library's holdings.
Two other members of the Working Group, Robert Donia, a visiting assistant research scientist at CREES, and John Fine, a University history professor, presented the bibliography.
The two men delivered the bibliography in March on a previously planned trip to Sarajevo, in which they lectured on the content of their book.
"This was John's fourth visit to Bosnia since 1994, and my eighth," Donia said. "John's time in Bosnia goes back to the 1960s and mine to the 1970s, so our interest in strengthening ties with the community of historians and librarians in Sarajevo is long-standing."
In return, the Sarajevo library has been sending a variety of rare and unusual publications to add to University's collection.
Donia said a University of Sarajevo professor and his students are working on a web page to make the list internationally accessible.
"It may be that the National and University Library will never be reconstituted as a physical library but rather as a gathering of virtual works and cross-references in cyberspace, in a form yet to be precisely determined," Donia said, adding that the collection would then be the world's first "virtual library."