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The Library of Congress stands today as the embodiment of our national memory. Imagine a horde of vandalsburning it and the National Archives while an alien army guarded the FBI headquarters and the TreasuryDepartment, and you may have some notion of how Iraqis felt when American troops erected a protectivecordon around the ministries of oil and of the interior while permitting looters to demolish the NationalLibrary and ransack the National Museum. [...]Few people appreciate the fragility of civilizations and the fragmentary character of our knowledge aboutthem. Most students believe that what they read in history books corresponds to what humanity livedthrough in the past, as if we have recovered all the facts and assembled them in the correct order, as if wehave it under control, got it down in black on white, and packaged it securely between a textbook's covers.That illusion quickly dissipates for anyone who has worked in libraries and archives. You pick up a scent ina published source, find a reference in a catalogue, follow a paper trail through boxes of manuscripts -- butwhat do you discover in the end? Only a few fragments that somehow survived as evidence of what otherhuman beings experienced in other times and places. How much has disappeared under char and rubble?We do not even know the extent of our ignorance.Imperfect as they are, therefore, libraries and archives, museums and excavations, scraps of paper andshards of pottery provide all we can consult in order to reconstruct the worlds we have lost. The loss of alibrary or a museum can mean the loss of contact with a vital strain of humanity. That is what has happenedin Baghdad.Princeton historian Robert Darnton in the Washington Post - worth to read in full!