UNESCO'S MEMORY OF THE WORLD PROGRAM is doing great work in manuscript preservation, through both conservation and digitization. The UNESCO website has a page on the project (link above). There's an introductory interview with Abdelaziz Abid, "a programme specialist in the Memory of the World programme." Excerpt:

That means that digital documents are even more fragile than those on traditional materials?

Of course. A piece of parchment can survive for several centuries. Newsprint lasts several decades. It isn’t that the CD-ROM or the USB key can’t last for decades too, but the way in which the information is coded soon becomes obsolete. The problem isn’t the lifespan of the physical materials, but the progress in formats.

In Yemen, manuscripts were discovered in the main Sana’a mosque by chance that had remained walled up for 13 centuries! If you forget a digital document somewhere, at the end of ten years there’s nothing left of it.

If we don’t pay attention to preserving digital documents, we will leave a black hole for future generations. They’ll find Sumerian clay tablets, Chinese, Arabic and European manuscripts and paper…and getting to the 20th and 21st centuries, nothing! We must preserve traces of what we have created.

As regular readers know, I keep a special eye out for manuscript collections and hoards that may preserve early Jewish texts and somewhat later Jewish and Christian biblical apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. A couple of the projects seem relevant.

Timbuktu manuscripts: Africa’s written history unveiled

Excerpt:

Long forsaken treasures

But do the indigenous populations of Mali know that they possess, under their feet or in their attics, hundreds of thousands of vital manuscripts dating from the 13th to the 19th century? Nothing is less certain. Because of a sanctified notion of African oral tradition, an absence of translation due to lack of funds (barely 1% of texts are translated into classical Arabic, French or English) and a certain reserve about rummaging through the memory of Africa, however honorable, government authorities are hesitant to exhume what resembles a political golden age.

Let us judge for ourselves: treatises on good governance, texts on the harmful effects of tobacco, pharmacopeial synopses…works on law (particularly on divorce and the status of divorced women), theology, grammar and mathematics sit in dusty heaps in private libraries or at the Ahmed Baba Documentation and Research Centre in Timbuktu. Written commentaries by the sages of Cordoba, Baghdad or Djenne can still be seen there. On screen-fronted shelves, legal acts regulating the lives of Jews and apostate Christians testify to the intense commercial activity of the era. Parchments concerning selling and freeing slaves, the market prices of salt, spices, gold and feathers are propped against correspondence between sovereigns from both sides of the Sahara, illustrated with illuminations in gold.

All this is frightening. It is intimidating, to the point that even scientists are troubled by so much available knowledge. George Bohas, professor of Arabic at the Ecole normale supérieure in Lyon and an initiator of the Vecmas program (evaluation and critical editing of sub-Saharan Arabic manuscripts) notes, “We estimate the body of existing manuscripts at 180,000, of which 25% have been inventoried, less than 10% catalogued, and 40% are still in wooden or iron containers!” Not counting all the manuscripts stashed in the homes of families, who don’t want to give them up, either out of ignorance or for sordid profiteering reasons.

PaleoJudaica has been following the story of Timbuktu's manuscripts for some time. See here and follow the many links back.

The second project is:

The Matenadaran, from copyist monks to the digital age

In the heart of Erevan, capital of Armenia, the Matenadaran houses seventeen thousand manuscripts and 30,000 documents, some dating back to antiquity. Texts on very varied subjects, written in Arabic, Persian, Syriac, Greek, Latin, Amharic, Japanese and certain Indian languages, are stored together in this museum-library, created at the same time as the Armenian alphabet in 405. Today the Matenadaran is entering the digital age thanks to UNESCO.

Good stuff. Who knows what they're going to find in these collections?

UPDATE: The dratted transition to New Bloggger seems to have screwed up a lot of my internal links in past posts, which is most irritating. Earlier references to the Timbuktu archives can be found here, here, here, and here.