Nazi Destruction of Libraries to be Subject of Lecture

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- "The Nazi Destruction of Jewish Archives and Libraries in Cracow During World War II" will be the title of a talk by Marek Sroka of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to be presented at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 17 in the University at Buffalo Archives, Room 420 Capen Hall on the UB North (Amherst) Campus. It will be free and open to the public.

Sroka's original historical research into this neglected subject won him the 2002 Justin Winsor Prize presented by the American Library Association (ALA) Library History Round Table (LHRT). His winning paper will be published in the forthcoming issue of the journal Libraries and Culture.

His lecture is sponsored by the UB Department of Library and Information Studies in the School of Informatics, the Polish Room of Lockwood Memorial Library, the University Archives and the George and Mary Bobinski Fund, which sponsors lectures in the humanities and library science.

Lorna Peterson, professor of information and library science at UB, chaired the LHRT award committee and says Sroka used the primary and secondary literature of Poland to tell the story of a neglected part of library history.

"His use of multiple language sources is evidence of the careful and deliberate research that went into his paper. He filled a significant gap in library history by documenting the destruction of a people's culture, intellectual capital and memory. Very little has been written in English on the topic of Jewish libraries and archives in Poland and their destruction," she says, "and his work will encourage additional needed research on this subject."

Sroka is an assistant professor of library administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Slavic cataloger in the university's Slavic and East European Library. He holds a Master of Arts degree in English language and literature from the Jagiellonian University at Krakow, Poland, and a master's degree in information and library science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His areas of research include Polish libraries and librarianship, and the eastern European Internet.