"Where did Earth get its name?"

Lynsie, a third grader from Utah, knew that the planets got their names from Greek and Roman gods, but couldn't figure out how the earth was named. She wrote to the Library of Congress for an answer.

Lynsie was a smart young lady to think of the Library of Congress. The amount of information our National Library has on every known subject is unmatched in the rest of the world. With more than 100 million books, periodicals, films, and recordings in 470 different languages, the Library is not only our national memory, it is, more than any other entity, the world's memory.

Lynsie's letter ended up on the desk of Dr. Ronald Wilkinson, the Library's Senior Science Specialist. It made his day. He liked Lynsie's letter because he likes to encourage people in their quest for knowledge.

Besides, he has a reason for liking to share information. In his own way, he is a staunch conservationist. The conservation he and his associates practice is conserving knowledge. In his view, it is knowledge that will enable us to solve our environmental problems. Maybe even more important, it is knowledge that makes us care.

We take our library system for granted, but think for a moment what would happen if it were destroyed. What if suddenly we had no access to our national memory? What if there were no way to answer Lynsie's question about how earth got its name?

It's just about an unimaginable thought, and yet it happened to a country recently.When Iraq invaded Kuwait, almost the first thing the soldiers were ordered to do was to empty the shelves of all the buildings that housed libraries. Iraqi scholars who accompanied the soldiers arranged for the valuable items to be shipped off to Baghdad, and then the soldiers systematically burned what was left.

The goal--and it was totally deliberate--was to destroy Kuwait's national memory. Without their books, newspapers, government documents, and other printed material, future Kuwaitis would only vaguely remember their culture and their past. In time, they would forget entirely, making it far easier for Iraq to assimilate them.

Burning the Kuwaiti books and records could have been more of a catastrophe for the Kuwaiti nation spiritually than burning their oil fields was economically.Fortunately for Kuwait, however, our own Library of Congress has an immense collection of books and records on Kuwait and we could help.

Under the direction of Dr. George Atiyeh, head of the Near East Section, the Library gave them microfilm copies of a large part of the destroyed newspapers and government records. We also had lists of most of the books they were missing and could help them in locating additional copies. Kuwait has had most of its written memory restored to it, thanks in large part to the conservation efforts of our own Library of Congress.

And thanks to that organization, students like Lynsie and others can find answers to questions about the past or the present. And what about Lynsie's question? Our English word "earth" comes from a German word that Germanic conquerors brought with them in the fifth century when they invaded what is now England.

September is National Library Card Sign-Up Month. If you don't have a library card, how about paying a visit to your local library and taking advantage of the storehouse of knowledge preserved there?