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Course: Special topics in art history > Unit 1
Lesson 7: Documenting and protecting cultural heritage- Diarna: documenting the places of a vanishing Jewish history
- A Landmark Decision: Penn Station, Grand Central, and the architectural heritage of NYC
- Frameworks for cultural heritage protection: from ancient writing to modern law
- A race against time: manuscripts and digital preservation
- Provenance and the Antiquities Market
- Saving Torcello, an ancient church in the Venetian Lagoon
- A Renaissance masterpiece nearly lost in war: Piero della Francesca, The Resurrection
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A race against time: manuscripts and digital preservation
The Hill Museum and Manuscript Library digitally preserves ancient manuscripts, keeping them in their original locations. This approach respects cultural heritage and allows global access to these treasures. The library works with hundreds of libraries worldwide, digitizing texts from various religious traditions and languages, promoting a more global and interdisciplinary approach to manuscript studies. A conversation with Father Columba Stewart, OSB, executive director of the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (Collegeville, Minnesota) and Dr. Beth Harris.
Want to join the conversation?
- Is there more to the biblical manuscript then there is today , are there more books?(4 votes)
- The church edited out several books from the Bible. The anagignoskomena are Tobit, Judith, Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of Jesus ben Sira (Sirach), Baruch, Letter of Jeremiah (in the Vulgate this is chapter 6 of Baruch), additions to Daniel (The Prayer of Azarias, Susanna and Bel and the Dragon), additions to Esther, 1 Maccabees, 2 Maccabees, 3 Maccabees, 1 Esdras(4 votes)
- I wonder why they don't let other people read the manuscripts?(3 votes)
- The reason why not everyone can read the old scripts is because they can potentially damage these old manuscripts. There are only a few editions that we have these days from some of these books. By putting them online, everyone can read them without the chance that they can potentially damage these old priceless books.(5 votes)
- Did the ancient Greeks write manuscripts? If so, what were they about?(2 votes)
- Yes, they did. You can see some and read about them here: https://www.bl.uk/greek-manuscripts/articles/manuscripts-of-classical-greek-authors(2 votes)
- why did these people make these paintings like this?(1 vote)
- Please give a tie signature from the video so that your classmates here can understand which images you mean by "paintings like this". THEN some of your classmates here might be able to offer some help in why "these" people painted them "like this."(2 votes)
- Guys , can somebody share the url of this website with manuscripts on a video ?!(1 vote)
Video transcript
(piano music) - [Dr. Harris] I'm
sitting in the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library at St. John's Abbey and University here in
Collegeville, Minnesota. This is an amazing collection
and the work that you do here to digitally preserve
manuscripts is very important. And we've got one manuscript out. - [Father Columba] So we have before us a fourteenth century
manuscript from Egypt. And this is unusual for us,
because most of our collection is microfilm or digital images, the principle being that we
leave manuscripts in place, which is what we do now in
the cultural heritage world, and make images of them that
we can then share online with scholars around the world. And so that's a way of
partnering with communities which have kept these
precious historical objects for many centuries, often
at great cost to themselves. - [Dr. Harris] In the colonial era, we might have taken the manuscripts, brought them back to Western Europe, but now we're leaving
these important objects in the places that they were made. - [Father Stewart] So when we
think of the British Library, the Bibliotheque Nationale in France, these are amazing libraries
and most of the manuscripts that are in them are
items which were collected in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, by people who would go shopping
in places where poverty or lack of understanding of what some of these materials were encouraged people to say "Sure, take them", and then they got much-needed
money or other resources. Of course, now things are very different. There are cultural heritage
communities, organizations and governmental offices
dedicated to caring for these in a way that just didn't
exist in previous times. - [Dr. Harris] Often books,
manuscripts, antiquities were collected with no
thought to the effects of removing them from
their source communities. - [Father Stewart] There was a sense that the non-European,
the non-Western person, who might belong to an ancient but different religious tradition, was not capable or sophisticated enough to care for and appreciate these items, but at the same time they
had a very deep cultural and often linguistic
connection with these items that is impossible for
an outsider to replicate. - [Dr. Harris] Monasteries
have been in the work of preserving manuscripts and
making copies of manuscripts for hundreds and hundreds of years. - [Father Stewart]
Everyone has a caricature of the medieval monks copying manuscripts and there were points, particularly in the early Middle Ages, where continuing the great chain of transmission of learning was at risk, and thanks to the monasteries,
when social structures and governments were
collapsing, the chain continued. We've always done it, because monasteries are
places that have readers. Every monk's supposed to do
sacred reading every day. It wasn't just the Bible
but it was commentaries, theological works, philosophical texts that helped you understand
theological writing, scientific works, mathematics. So this idea that universal
knowledge was really important, even for the monastic culture. - [Dr. Harris] Now we're
preserving and continuing that tradition by digitizing
these manuscripts, but making them available
to a much wider audience. - [Father Stewart] We go to a place and we photograph every
manuscript in the library, so just as early monks had this
notion of universal culture, we too feel that every handwritten book in a library is worthy of digitization. We can't decide now what
somebody 100 years from now is going to find really interesting. - [Dr. Harris] - The library digitizes not just Christian manuscripts, but also manuscripts from
other religious traditions. - [Father Stewart] Well
recently we've been actively engaging with collections
of Islamic manuscripts, because they are in places
where they are at risk. - [Dr. Harris] The library
works with hundreds of partner libraries all over the world. - [Father Stewart] I
think we've worked now with around 500 different libraries. - [Dr. Harris] So that
idea of accessibility is central to the mission. - [Father Stewart] Access
works in surprising ways. It's not simply a scholar
at an American University who expects to work from home. It's also serving
communities in the places where we digitize the manuscripts, where for whatever reason,
local people cannot gain access. And in other cases, given
some of our recent work in Iraq and Syria, the original
is no longer in existence. We hope that we can foster scholarship that's interested in the
connections between communities. So one advantage that we
have to a traditional library in developing countries or in
places like the Middle East, was the libraries tend to
represent a single culture, a single language, a single place. And the opportunity for
comparative manuscript study is becoming more and more important. So here's a place where we have Western Christian, Eastern Christian, as well as this abundance
of Islamic material and Arabic and Persian,
indigenous African languages, and that's going to make possible an entirely new kind of scholarship. - [Dr. Harris] So a more global and a more interdisciplinary
approach to manuscript studies that's enabled by this
digital preservation. And we're talking about that on a scale that is unprecedented in human history. One of the biggest
projects that the library's involved in is digitizing the manuscripts that were recently saved in Timbuktu. - [Father Stewart] These
are the manuscripts that were evacuated from Timbuktu just before into the early stages of jihadist takeover of the region, and between the manuscripts
that were evacuated, the manuscripts that have remained, we'll be able to have a much fuller view of what the manuscript culture and intellectual vitality of Timbuktu was. And what's fascinating about
the Timbuktu manuscripts is there are a number of
documents that give us a sense of a place which was indeed, at one time, a very important crossroads. Not only for trade and intellectual life, but also the flow of peoples, connections between Timbuktu and Spain, connections between Timbuktu and Egypt. So all of these great
centers of Islamic learning were connected and people
in the Premodern World moved around a lot more
than we think they did. - [Dr. Harris] And this work
continues to be important because there is still
political instability in Mali and radical jihadists who may, in fact, target these manuscripts, that although many written in Arabic and many having to do with Islam, don't conform to their idea
of what Islam should be. - [Father Stewart]
There are a lot of risks to manuscripts, there always have been. What we're finding now is
the volatility of culture in many parts of the world
is posing a particular risk, because things can be
destroyed far more quickly and thoroughly than was possible
in a pre-technological age. There are also accidents. So some of the greatest
libraries in the world have been destroyed by a fire. The great archive in Cologne, Germany, it collapsed, because they've been digging a new subway line underneath it. - [Dr. Harris] And if those things had been digitized, we'd still have them. - [Father Stewart] We actually
microfilmed a lot of them. - [Dr. Harris] Good job, (laughs). Thank you very much for all
the work that you're doing. (piano music)