Vitabu Books

This year, I found UNESCO's message on World Book and Copyright Day particularly poignant. In March 2015 , the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library at St. John’s University in Queens, New York, announced that it was creating digital records of more than 22,000 rare and historically significant documents from a library in Mali, Timbuktu. The family library of Mamma Haidara has one of the largest manuscript collections in Timbuktu, and some of its documents date back to the 13th century. Two years earlier, Hill Museum & Manuscript Library said that it set up a two-camera studio in Mali's capital city of Bamako. In collaboration with a Mali-based nongovernmental organization, local workers were trained and began creating digital copies of manuscripts from Timbuktu's private libraries. The studio expanded recently, adding two more cameras. “Our team in Bamako has made remarkable progress. After a full year of work, the team digitized over 250,000 images from the Abubakr Ben