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Thursday, August 04, 2011

Remembering 10 years on...

There will be a lot of stories of remembrance and the human loss of 9/11 in the coming weeks. This is one about some of the cultural loss...

Mystery surrounds loss of records, art on 9/11
Letters written by Helen Keller. Forty-thousand photographic negatives of John F. Kennedy taken by the president's personal cameraman. Sculptures by Alexander Calder and Auguste Rodin. The 1921 agreement that created the agency that built the World Trade Center.

Besides ending nearly 3,000 lives, destroying planes and reducing buildings to tons of rubble and ash, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks destroyed tens of thousands of records, irreplaceable historical documents and art.

In some cases, the inventories were destroyed along with the records. And the loss of human life at the time overshadowed the search for lost paper. A decade later, agencies and archivists say they're still not completely sure what they lost or found, leaving them without much of a guide to piece together missing history.

Twenty-one libraries were destroyed, not to mention other collections of sculpture, art, historical documents, and artefacts.

Via LISNews.

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