Numerous opportunities and challenges exist to preserving ancient African manuscripts as I learned while at the Preserving Ancient African Manuscripts Conference last December in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. While attending the conference, I had the great pleasure of meeting a History Professor, Dr. Kabiru Chafe, the Director of Arewa House Center in Kaduna, Nigeria.
During our side-bar conversations, I could hear Dr. Chafe's urgency to discuss practical issues that are associated with the care and sustainability of Arabic manuscripts. Our conversations about the steps involved in the conservation of ancient manuscripts, digital preservation, and the eventual sustainability of ancient manuscripts in digital formats resulted in his recent visit to Cornell. During Dr. Chafe's visit, he met with my Library colleagues in the Carl A. Kroch Division of Rare and Manuscripts Collections and the Digital Scholarship Services unit, which is where I work.
Check out the article that describes some of the goals of his project to digitize just a few of the objects within the Arewa House archives to start. To view the article that appeared in the Cornell Chronicle on 3/19/2011, follow the link in the header or this one here: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/May11/LibChafe.html
