BluthCompanyBanana

Props for being awesome.

She has already said that the digitation is dangerous to the manuscripts and has to be done much more slowly and at much more expense. The urgent priority right now is to keep them alive--no time to digitize, they are literally being eaten away by mildew as we speak.

The association of family libraries that Abdel Kader presides has digitized a couple thousand manuscripts (there are hundreds of thousands of manuscirpts). because the manuscripts are, for the most part, made of linen rag paper that is extremely brittle because of the dry climate and because most of the inks are ferous and unstable, you cannot use a heat or light based digitizing process. Everything has to be done by cold-circuit photographic process - as you can imagine this adds oodles of time and cost to the process. The war in Mali has put a real damper on this work as Abdel Kader concentrated all his energy on the evacuation and now on maintaining the evacuated manuscripts. We fantasize about digitizing the whole corpus -but right now, we need to ensure the physical integrity of the manuscripts to ensure there is something to digitize!

Why don't you move the manuscripts to the United States or Europe for protection?