Amid cost-cutting measures, Canada has closed seven of its 11 Department of Fisheries and Oceans libraries across the country. Around 1,000 scientists lost their jobs in the process. But what's saddening were the books which observers claimed never got digitized. They believed the books have been all together damaged and burned.

Sylvain Guimont, an official with one of the unions representing federal environment workers, personally saw how a dumpster was being filled up with hundreds of destroyed research books and periodicals.

"A lot of employees were really shocked," Guimont told Toronto Star. "There's a concern that research will be lost forever."

Postmedia News, citing a classified document that it was able to obtain, confirmed the "culling of materials" would be the main activity to reduce the number of libraries.

"The fact that many materials were thrown away or given away is heartbreaking to those of us who are dedicated to this field of research (marine science and fisheries) and the history of science in Canada," Peter Wells, a prominent marine environmental scientist at Dalhousie University, told The Tyee.

Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans argued the decision to consolidate the network of libraries was based on the value for taxpayers. It stressed that the primary users of DFO libraries were employees of the department, at over 86 percent. Only five to 12 people on the average who work outside of DFO visited the 11 libraries each year. "It is not fair to taxpayers to make them pay for libraries that so few people actually used."

It said the consolidation process will help the government save $430,000 annually.

But "all that intellectual capital is now gone. It's like a book burning. It's the destruction of our cultural heritage. It just makes us poorer as a nation," an unidentified scientist told The Tyee.