Fire May Have Damaged 1 Million Documents in a Cultural ‘Chernobyl’

A fire is believed to have damaged more than 1 million historic books and papers in a Moscow library said to contain some of the richest collections of work in the Slavic language.

The Guardian reports:

The blaze, which began on Friday and was still not completely out on Saturday evening, ravaged 2,000 square metres (21,500 sq ft) of the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences (Inion) in Moscow, which was created in 1918 and holds 10m documents, some of which date back to the 16th century.

Vladimir Fortov, the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said: “It’s a major loss for science. This is the largest collection of its kind in the world, probably equivalent to the [US] Library of Congress.

“One can find documents there that are impossible to find elsewhere, all the social sciences use this library. What has happened here is reminiscent of Chernobyl,” he said, referring to the 1986 nuclear catastrophe.

Read more here.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.