The Rev. Columba Stewart, the executive director of the
Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John's University (in Collegeville, Minnesota), has a piece called "Technology can Preserve World History" (available
here) in the Minneapolis
Star Tribune. It begins:
Walter M. Miller Jr.'s 1960 novel "A Canticle for Leibowitz"
imagined a world hundreds of years in the future in which an order of
Catholic monks devotes itself to recovering the fragments of human
literary culture left after nuclear war. As we read about the
destruction of cultural heritage in Timbuktu, home of some of the most
important libraries of the Muslim world, track the progress of war and
ethnic violence across the Middle East, and contemplate a nuclear-armed
Iran, Miller's novel seems eerily prophetic.
Manuscripts -- handwritten books and ancient archival records -- are
especially vulnerable in such conflicts. Unlike printed books, each
manuscript is unique and irreplaceable. Once lost, there is no way to
recover what it contained. Each manuscript has a story about who created
it, who read it, who cared for it. Each of those people leaves a mark:
the text itself, written by hand; the scribe's note of when and where it
was copied; the reader's notes; the stamps or seals of the libraries or
individuals who cared for it.
Rev. Stewart goes on to describe the efforts of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library to
digitally preserve endangered manuscripts abroad:
I entered the monastery in Collegeville in 1981, and since 2003 have
been directing the manuscript preservation project. We have been largely
focused on the Middle East, Turkey and India, helping threatened
communities to digitize their manuscript heritage just in case. Among
the treasures now safely in digital form are all of the surviving
Armenian and Syriac manuscripts held by churches in Turkey, some as old
as the seventh and eighth centuries. In Aleppo, an Iraqi refugee from
Mosul photographed the manuscripts brought from Urfa/Edessa in 1923, and
local teams were trained to photograph Syriac, Arabic and Armenian
manuscripts in the city that is now facing destruction. Among the
manuscripts from Urfa is the only complete copy of a 12th-century
account of the Crusades as witnessed by the Christians of the Middle
East. In Iraq, we have worked with a team of young Christians, many of
them refugees, who have tracked down thousands of important manuscripts
and made them available digitally to researchers throughout the world.
Recent projects in Jerusalem have digitized some of the extraordinary
manuscript collections held by Christian and Muslim communities in the
Old City, one of the most sensitive and volatile locations on the
planet.