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The artillery attack on the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina in August 1992 resulted in massive destruction to the library and the culture it represented. When the four days of bombardment ended on Aug. 27, all that remained were burned ruins. The library community was horrified by the level of destruction, and librarians throughout the world have generously offered to assist in the rebuilding effort. The recovery effort has several distinct aspects: reconstructing the building, re-creating the catalogs and rebuilding the collections.

Support and offers of assistance have come from the international library community for reconstruction of the library. The Sabre Foundation is among those coordinating efforts to restock libraries in Bosnia, and several American universities are donating materials. Early on, Harvard University Library and Harvard University Press announced that they would play a leading role in this effort to rebuild the collection. However, those efforts are hampered by the destruction of the catalog—there is no record of what was held by the library.

The first step in the process is the generation of a database of bibliographic information pertaining to Bosnia (referred to as Bosniaca) along with an indication of the institutions that hold the material. Representatives from Harvard University Library, Yale University Library and OCLC met in mid-1995 and agreed that OCLC should assume the technical leadership role in support of the project within the United States. A group in the OCLC Office of Research, working with Robert Bremer of the OCLC Library Resources Management Division, is coordinating OCLC’s contribution to this international undertakin

Bosniaca is defined as all documents in any format written in any language on or about the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina. It also includes all items published within the territory of Bosnia. Bosniaca records in WorldCat (the OCLC Online Union Catalog) will form the basis of the Bosniaca catalog being built by the OCLC Office of Research. An initial search of WorldCat in November 1996 was performed for records matching a carefully researched set of search criteria. At the time of the search, WorldCat contained almost 36 million records. There were 103,983 records that matched one or more of the search criteria. This initial search will be followed by more finely tuned searches.

These beginning efforts are concentrated on producing a subset of the OCLC database. In the future, it may be desirable to add records from other sources. The resulting database will eventually be made available to the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina and other interested parties.

Ed O’Neill is consulting research scientist, OCLC Office of Research.

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