The Vespiary Book Binding & Book Conservation

Looks like digitization projects in Timbuktu have made the New York Times again. Kevin over at Library Preservation had a post last year regarding efforts by various African governments to digitize the sea of rare books floating around the once and future intellectual hub of the African continent. This article focuses on the work of Aluka, a non-profit dedicated to preserving and disseminating African scholarship, who in tandem with a team from Northwestern University have been various manuscripts from the region. Aluka also has a blog that details its work.

All I can saw is, wow. I’m partially writing this blog post for myself, so I can come back to it on some day in the future and really dig into the collection, it just looks so juicy! I’m also doing a lot of reading for a future post of lost libraries, so it’s very heartening to see that books that were thought to have been lost are now slowly emerging from the woodwork (or rather, sand-dune) and being made available for all. There’s also a great collection of digitized Timbuktu manuscripts available through the Library of Congress website.