Librarian helps restore some of Iraq's civilization

For the 23 years Saddam Hussein reigned supreme in Iraq, the bloodless field of library science wasn't a priority. Preserving authorial manuscripts and ensuring Baghdad residents had access to the latest Pynchon novel sagged at the bottom of the to-do list.

When the U.S. military invaded in 2003, things worsened for Iraqi librarians: Their places of work became targets. Libraries were looted, and librarians resorted to sneaky tactics like erecting fake walls to hide books. Even so, rioters delivered a severe blow to the nation's literary history.

"You name it, it was gone," said Harvey Varnet, the new University of South Carolina Beaufort's library director. "(Looters) could sell that in a market. Furniture, equipment, shelves. You know, these people were looking at, 'The world is falling apart,' and were desperate. ... We didn't do a good job protecting their cultural heritage."

Enter Varnet, whom the university hired in January. He has spent time in the Middle East over the past 25 years building, teaching and, most recently, helping rebuild Iraq's antiquated library system.

"See the world before you leave it. That's my motto," he said. "I like to try different things."

With a grant from the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Varnet brought 10 of Iraq's academic leaders to Amman, Jordan in October 2007 to update them on modern library science curriculum, including electronic cataloguing -- a great departure from Iraqi libraries' old-school paper card-cataloguing systems. When Hussein took overin 1979 and dedicated most government money to a war against neighboring Iran, Iraqi library science screeched to a halt. Varnet calls it the "Rip Van Winkle effect."

"You fall asleep in 1980 and wake up in 2003, and suddenly everything's different," he said.

While working with grants from Simmons College in Boston, his alma mater, Varnet also helped train scores of Iraqi librarians in 2005 and 2006 in Jordan and the United Arab Emirates. Somewhat shell-shocked librarians spent from two weeks to a month learning about up-to-date cataloguing and classification methods, Internet database research and archiving.

They were also grateful to leave the war-torn country, he said.

"People were still pretty tightly wrapped, pretty tense," Varnet said. "You can physically see the difference in people in two or three days. It's hard to describe, easy to see. ... When they came to training sessions, they were starved, they were thirsty, just hungry, hungry, hungry for what we could give them. Their curiosity was almost insatiable."

Michele Cloonan, Simmons College's dean of library information science, worked with Varnet during in 2005-06.

"It was hard for us to believe that they were so out of touch with what was going on in the world," she said. "Baghdad used to be a center of learning. ... The people we were working with were well-educated. They just were out of date and needed to be updated."

Varnet came to the University of South Carolina Beaufort from American University of Kuwait. Beaufort is another stop on his journey to live in different areas, he said.

"I like to work in places that are growing. Who doesn't want to live down here? Often times you can find a good job or a good place. This is a good job in a good place. I'm from Massachusetts," he said. "I like it to be warm. I don't want it to be 140 like it was in Kuwait, but I like it warm."
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