YEAR IN REVIEW 2001: LIBRARIES-AND-MUSEUMS

Libraries and Museums Libraries Two important roles of libraries-as repositories of knowledge and as keepers of culture-were highlighted in 2000. Libraries collected vast quantities of written materials that ranged from incunabula to digital information. Parents and politicians in the U.S. continued to voice concerns over children's access to inappropriate material in libraries. Once again, legislation was introduced in the U.S. Congress that would require the schools and libraries receiving federal "e-rate" subsidies for Internet connections to install filtering software that would block access to World Wide Web sites containing sexually explicit content. Voters in Holland, Mich., drew national attention in February when they defeated (55% to 45%) a ballot proposal that would have required the city to withhold funding from the Herrick District Library unless the library installed filters on all of its public Internet workstations. King Juan Carlos I of Spain launched a bilingual Web site- -developed jointly by the National Library of Spain and the U.S. Library of Congress. The latter, which celebrated its 200th birthday on April 24, was cautioned in July by the National Research Council to act quickly to "address strategy, management, funding, and staffing issues that threaten to render the institution second rate among today's digital libraries." Libraries increasingly scanned print materials into digital form to make them accessible worldwide; some nations, however, clearly feared losing control of information and communication. At the National Library of China, some 24 million pages of printed information were now available on-line, but in October the Chinese government issued draconian new Internet policies that forbade, among other things, spreading rumours and hurting China's "reputation." Meanwhile, friends and colleagues in the U.S. used the Internet to help secure the release from a Chinese prison of Song Yongyi, a librarian at Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pa. He had been imprisoned for nearly six months by Chinese authorities on charges of illegally gathering documents on behalf of foreign interests. He was released on January 28 and became a U.S. citizen on February 20. The Shanghai Library completed restoration of some 30,000 ancient rubbings from stone inscriptions that illuminated life in China. In Berlin the handwritten scores of many of Johann Sebastian Bach's greatest works were turning to dust as the country commemorated the 250th anniversary of the composer's death. Analysis of the documents showed that the ink Bach used was extremely acidic. Cooperative efforts by the State Library in Berlin, IBM Corp., and eight other institutions produced a digital preservation Web site-www.bachdigital.org. A number of claims were made during the year concerning library materials seized as spoils of war. An Italian archbishop renewed a request that the British Library (BL) return a 12th-century manuscript looted from a cathedral near Naples during World War II. Monks at the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai, Egypt, were demanding the return from the BL of the Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest-existing New Testament in the world. Ethiopian scholars were pressing a number of British libraries to return manuscripts, jewelry, religious icons, and other artifacts taken by British troops in 1868. A parliamentary commission was studying the claim. Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md., returned a section of a 9th-century edition of the Qu'ran written in gold leaf to its original home in Turkey. Parts of the Gold Qu'ran had disappeared after 1756, and the section was bequeathed to Johns Hopkins in 1942. According to Elan Steinberg, executive director of the World Jewish Congress, some 186,000 books confiscated by the Nazis were given in 1951 to various Austrian libraries. Documents discovered in the State Archives in Vienna revealed that the Austrian government authorized this distribution. Valuable library materials were stolen, too. Thefts from university libraries in Poland, Russia, and Ukraine in recent years were attributed in 2000 to an "international book mafia." The gang was known as the Astronomers because many of the books stolen were works by Copernicus and Ptolemy; Interpol believed the gang was Russian, and journalists speculated that the thefts were being commissioned by a fanatic collector. A tornado that on March 28 struck downtown Fort Worth, Texas, caused $1.2 million in damage to the exterior and some $400,000 to the interior of the city's recently renovated Central Library. Catastrophic flooding soaked some 100,000 volumes at the North Dakota State University library in the early hours of June 20; damage totaled at least $5 million. In January the Seattle, Wash.-based Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation donated $2.5 million to the Canadian province of British Columbia for computer equipment; the gift also included $1 million of software. In August, Microsoft Corp. cofounder Paul Allen donated $20 million to the Seattle Public Library, earmarking $15 million for books and other materials and $5 million to go toward building a children's centre in the new central library. The Friends of Cuban Libraries, an anti-Castro group based in the U.S., reported that some 30 independent libraries had opened in Cuba and offered access to books banned by the government. The caretakers of these collections were reportedly subjected to "systematic persecution," although it was not clear if this was because of book-related problems or oppositionist activities. Meanwhile, the British government planned to spend 252 million (about $380 million) to equip libraries, pubs, and soccer clubs with computers and Internet connections in a move to extend the Internet to the "information underclass." A number of new libraries opened in 2000. In Israel, at Yad Vashem, a new archive and library containing the world's largest collection of Holocaust material opened. In Sarawak, Malaysian officials greeted the millennium by opening the Sarawak State Library. American Vietnam veteran William J. Kelly, Jr., financed a new library that opened in the southern province of Binh Phuoc, Vietnam. Museums The opening of several new museums around the world highlighted 2000. Bankside Power Station in London was transformed into the new Tate Modern, which housed the modern collection of the Tate Gallery; the structure was designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. In Germany the last new federal museum opened in Greifswald; the Pommersches Landesmuseum was charged with interpreting Pomerania's history and culture. The inaugural exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin, designed by Daniel Libeskind, was postponed until 2001. Greece announced a new design competition for a museum to be built at the foot of the Acropolis in Athens and to be opened in time for the 2004 Athens Olympics. At the end of 2000, Italy planned to open a Mafia documentation centre in Sicily that was meant to break the code of silence surrounding organized crime. Thirty years after it was conceived, the Salvador Allende Museum of Solidarity opened in Santiago, Chile. After having been closed for a decade, the Iraq Museum in Baghdad reopened after the reinstallation of some 10,000 of the approximately 250,000 artifacts that had been crated and stored during the Gulf War. The national museum in Kabul, Afg., also reopened briefly for the first time after years of civil war. The oldest gallery in England, the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, was reopened in the spring after months of extensive renovations. Rome's Pinacoteca Capitolina resumed operations after a restoration and reorganization increased its available space. The Louvre opened its new galleries of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas and for the first time displayed art from sub-Saharan Africa. An alliance struck between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the State Hermitage Museum focused on the renovation of space at the Hermitage for exhibitions from the Guggenheim and the lending of works from the Hermitage for the Guggenheim's future space on the East River in New York City as well for other museums. The two institutions would also collaborate on the opening of a small museum in Las Vegas, Nev. Another joint venture, between the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Gallery, would result in a new, for-profit World Wide Web site from which the two institutions would sell goods and services. Holocaust survivors or their heirs continued to make claims for objects in European museums. At a gathering in Vilnius, Lithuania, 37 governments agreed to make every reasonable effort to achieve the restitution of cultural assets looted during World War II. Ten national museums in the United Kingdom posted and continually updated a list of works whose Holocaust-era ownership histories were incomplete; German museums and such American museums as the Art Institute of Chicago; the Denver Art Museum; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, took similar steps. In compliance with a 1998 law, Austrian museums examined their collections for Nazi booty. Images of those items for which owners could not be located would be posted on the Internet. The Czech Republic passed a law that would allow property confiscated by the Nazis to be returned, including material held in national museums. Russia passed a law that would permit victims of the Nazi regime or Russia's wartime allies to seek the return of looted art; this measure did not include, however, the lifting of a prohibition against the return of material taken by the Soviet Union from Germany or German citizens. Armenia, on the other hand, returned thousands of objects that the Red Army had taken from libraries and museums in Germany. Some museums were victims of theft, while others welcomed returned goods. Claude Monet's painting The Beach at Pourville was stolen from the National Gallery in Poznan, Pol., and a reproduction was put in its place. Thieves filched Paul Czanne's painting Auvers-sur-Oise after breaking into the University of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology. A stolen Enigma machine, used to break Nazi codes during World War II, was anonymously sent to a U.K. newscaster, who returned it to Bletchley Park, the home of Great Britain's wartime code breakers. It was missing several rotors, however. The Darder Museum of Natural History in Banyoles, Catalonia, Spain, returned the stuffed body of a 19th-century Bushman to Botswana after officials deemed the display (on view from 1916 to 1998) inappropriate. The Berlin Museum returned to Nepal a stone idol of Uma-Maheshwor, an 800-year-old stone relief stolen 18 years earlier. During 2000 an estimated $1.9 billion was spent on new museums and expansions in the U.S., ranging from Frank O. Gehry's $100 million Experience Music Project in Seattle, Wash., to the $1.2 million National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. Among the projects were the expansion of the $210 million Frederick Phineas and Sandra Priest Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the creation of a $2.5 million children's garden at the Winterthur (Del.) Museum. American museums boasted 865 million visits in 2000, up from the 600 million annual visits in the late 1980s. Increased scrutiny was therefore placed on these institutions, especially regarding ethical issues. Concerns both inside and outside museum groups prompted the museum community, led by the American Association of Museums, to produce ethical guidelines on the exhibition of borrowed objects. Barry Szczesny; Helen J. Wechsler