Lost Memory
A Working Group on "Lost Memory: Research on the Reconstruction of Lost and Dispersed Libraries" (working title) has been established, and it is composed of members representing the Memory of the World Sub-Committee for Education and Research (SCEaR), the International Council on Archives (ICA), and the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), as well as the AILC-ICLA.
The AILC-ICLA lead for the Working Group is Professor Achim Hölter.
Since the publication of Memory of the World: Lost Memory – Libraries and Archives destroyed in the Twentieth Century (Paris: UNESCO, 1996) prepared for UNESCO on behalf of IFLA by Hans van der Hoeven and on behalf of ICA by Joan van Albada, “Lost Memory” has become a main feature of the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme (MoW), including, in the last years, within the wider frame of Disaster Risk Reduction and Management.
The current Working Group commemorates the work of van der Hoeven and van Albada but with what we hope is a more positive slant, concentrating not just on the destruction but also on the reconstruction of such memory institutions.
The Working Group’s first goal is to publish a Special Issue of the SCEaR Newsletter. This is planned for 2026, on the 30th anniversary of the publication of van der Hoeven and van Albada’s landmark publication.
Related to “lost memory” and its recuperation is also the project by Professor Suqing Hu, of Hunan University (China), on the cultural history of the Ferghana Horse, which, now extinct, was introduced into China during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), and became central to the development of the Silk Roads and to cultural, political, and economic interactions across Central Asia. The “Heavenly Horse” has inspired a tradition that includes literary and artistic works such as official hymns, horse administration archives, sculptures, reliefs, murals, ceramics, textiles, and mortuary objects, etc.; as well as intangible heritage, such as oral myths, equestrian rituals, artistic performance, and cross-cultural storytelling traditions. A richly layered form of cultural heritage, it is preserved across textual, visual, material, oral, and now digital media.
You can read Suqing Hu’s overview of the topic in her article published in the SCEaR Newsletter 2025/2, and watch the video of her lecture within the ICLA/MoW Series.