TECHNOLOGY WATCH:

Grant Enables Jewish History To Be Digitized
Baker Foundation helps Jewish Theological Seminary Library prevent the decay of thousands of documents, some centuries old.

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer (The Jewish Week)
On a recent Thursday, Melissa Buschey, a conservationist at the Jewish Theological Seminary, opened up a hand-written Judeo-Arabic manuscript dating from the 1600s C.E. “Probably from somewhere in Italy,” Buschey said casually, turning the page.
Thick, clear polyester sheets encased each piece of paper, which would later be digitally photographed to be accessible online.

Buschey and her colleague Amy Armstrong had come to call the heavily-pocked text the “Swiss cheese document.” Without the careful encasement of each page and its digital photograph, the Swiss cheese document would have eventually become illegible—a scholar’s gold mine lost to impending parchment decay.

But that didn’t happen. The document was preserved because of their work and so will roughly 900 more rare manuscripts—some dating from at least the 12th century C.E. and held by the Library of The Jewish Theological Seminary. The preservation is made possible by a recent $100,000 donation given jointly by the Morris and Beverly Baker Foundation and an anonymous donor. “With the grant money these very fragile things can be re-housed,” said Armstrong, the Library’s senior conservationist, in the Library’s sanitized white conservation laboratory. (The workspace seems more like a medical office than a library.) The donation will directly pay for a two-year fellowship for Buschey, as well as two additional part-time conservationists.

[...]

The JTS Library is the largest owner of rare Hebrew manuscripts in the world, with some 11,000 in total, some dating as far back as the 10th century C.E. The library began accruing manuscripts when the institution, Conservative Judaism’s main hub, was founded in 1886, but it wasn’t until Solomon Schechter hired Alexander Marx, a German Jewish scholar and librarian, that the collection grew exponentially. Marx came to the JTS in 1903 and was its librarian until his death in 1953. “Under his leadership,” Kraemer said of Marx, “that’s when we got a real good chunk of our holdings.”
A major problem—for the JTS and any library holding rare texts—has always been how to preserve them.

[...]

Via Joseph I. Lauer's list.