The Kairouan Manuscript Project

The Kairouan Manuscript Project (KMP) is a network of scholars and heritage management professionals devoted to facilitating the care and management, study, and promotion of a unique collection of manuscripts located at the National Laboratory for the Preservation and Conservation of Parchment and Manuscripts (NLPCPM) in Raqqada, Kairouan, Tunisia.

The KMP encourages research and publications on this manuscript collection in order to contribute to international scholarship in academic fields such as Islamic intellectual history, codicology and book history, and comparative Mediterranean societies.

The long term goal of the KMP is to develop a sustainable strategy for collections care and management, through the implementation of both physical and administrative measures; to provide the tools, documentation, and adequate intellectual and material conditions to facilitate academic research on the Kairouan collection; to develop a long-term plan for improving the work environment in the National Laboratory for the Preservation and Conservation of Parchment and Manuscripts (NLPCPM), including improvements to the building and to building security; helping to draft policies and procedures for safe access to the collection in order to encourage academic research from a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives; to encourage collaborative research projects among scholars and between staff and scholars that will lead to academic publications, including joint publications in academic and professional journals; and to promote the collection as a site for academic scholarship and publication and the lab as a site for training a new generation of conservators.