THE EARLY MANUSCRIPTS ELECTRONIC LIBRARY, based in Los Angeles, has a website and a blog. The mission of the EMEL is:

The Early Manuscripts Electronic Library uses digital technologies to make manuscripts and other historical source materials accessible for study and appreciation by researchers and the public.

Their two big projects are:

National Center of Manuscripts, Tbilisi, Georgia

In September 2007, EMEL will travel to Tbilisi to collaborate with Georgia’s National Center of Manuscripts to digitize a selection of its most important manuscripts. The Center preserves outstanding manuscripts in a variety of languages that are the heritage of Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities. This project will feature the digitization of early Georgian manuscripts that originate from St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai.

St. Catherine’s Monastery ‘Diaspora’ Manuscripts Project

EMEL seeks to digitize manuscripts that were once part of the library of St. Catherine’s Monastery of the Sinai but are now scattered in libraries around the world. In this way, scholars will be able to study the history of the world’s oldest continually operating library and reconstruct the relationships among its manuscripts. As the first installment of the project, EMEL digitized the Peckover-Foot Codex, a 12th century Greek New Testament manuscript in the Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, UCLA.

The blog has details of the trip to Georgia. Both projects have lots of scope for interesting discoveries. Consider the following from the Tbilisi trip:

The problem that both our Georgian and Armenian colleagues face is how to read the erased layer of palimpsests. A palimpsest is a recycled manuscript. A scribe would scrape the surface of an old parchment manuscript to remove most of the original layer of ink so that the parchment could be used to make a new manuscript. The original, erased layer of ink is of great interest to scholars because it can be centuries older than the second layer.

The scraping of old manuscripts to make new ones was practiced more routinely in the Christian East than in the West, and the national libraries of Georgia and Armenia have between them some 10,000 pages of palimpsests. Some of these manuscripts are very early (5th and 6th centuries AD), and almost all of them have never been studied. It’s as if 10,000 pages of ancient Christian manuscripts were discovered in a cave--it would be big news! But these have been under our noses the whole time. We just need the right technology to make them legible again.

EMEL is cooperating with a team of U.S. scientists that has developed advanced methods of multi-spectral imaging to read the erased layer of text on palimpsests. These scientists proved their techniques with the famous Archimedes Palimpsest (www.archimedespalimpsest.org). The erased layer of the this palimpsest preserves the world’s only copies of several treatises by the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Using new multi-spectral imaging techniques these scientists restored these texts for the first time. The use of multi-spectral imaging on the large group of palimpsests we will encounter in Georgia and Armenia is still experimental. There are no guarantees. But it behooves us to make every effort to let these ancient texts speak again.

Bit by bit, a letter at a time, whatever it takes. Until we're done.