The FBI revisited the main public library in Broward County, Florida, as well as a regional library in Coral Springs October 2, looking for more traces of how the hijackers plotted their September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Meanwhile, several federal agencies have removed documents and reports from their Web sites in an effort to keep sensitive information out of the wrong hands. The Transportation Department, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Environmental Protection Agency have all pulled materials related to pipelines and chemical plants.
In Texas, Al-Badr Al-Hazmi, a Saudi Arabian radiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center whose home computer and one he used at the medical library were confiscated by the FBI, was released September 23 after apparently being cleared of any wrongdoing. In Maine, the Portland Press Herald reported September 30 that public library staffer Kathy Barry identified Mohamed Atta, one of the two men believed to have masterminded the attack, as having used a library computer last summer.
The New York Times reported September 22 that one of the largest collections of photographs of Broadway, Off and Off Off Broadway, and regional theater was destroyed when the 7 World Trade Center building collapsed. Housed nearby in the offices of Broadway Digital Entertainment, the 35,000 photographs captured 30 years of theater history, from 1970 to 2000. They were kept in file drawers in the company’s 14th-floor offices, which were crushed under a collapsed ceiling, along with computers documenting the collection.
As the casualty identification process continues, the Special Libraries Association has posted a list of members who lost their lives in the many corporate and law libraries that were located in the World Trade Center. Recently reported were the deaths of Helen Belilovsky of Fred Alger Management and Maureen Olson, 50, of Marsh and McLennan insurance brokers. The Law Librarian Resource Exchange is also posting the names of missing librarians and an exhaustive list of links to related Web sites.
In Washington, the Library of Congress, the Capitol, and congressional office buildings are being fitted with Mylar, a protective window film that is credited with saving lives during the Pentagon attack. LC’s American Folklife Center has called on folklorists across the nation to document on audiotape the reactions of ordinary citizens to the tragedy, similar to the way reactions to the bombing of Pearl Harbor were documented for the center’s Archive of Folk Culture in 1941.
Posted October 8, 2001.