Commemorating a Sad Day

Inside Higher Ed has an article up today by Scott McLemee discussing the history of book destruction. Here’s a teaser:

On April 14, 2003 — seven years ago today, and just over two weeks before George W. Bush declared “the end of major combat operations in Iraq” – the National Library in Iraq burned down. About a million books were destroyed; another blaze consumed several million documents at the National Archive. University libraries throughout Iraq met similar fates. Meanwhile there was looting of museums that contained some of the oldest-known human records — composed with reeds on pieces of moist clay, some five thousand years ago.