New addition to ‘Cultural Heritage’ projects

28 January 2021, by Webmaster

Photo: Kairouan Manuscript Project

The Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures has added a new project to its ‘Cultural Heritage’ section. Here, CSMC brings together projects focusing on the ‘heritage’ meaning of written artefacts, i.e. the need for preservation, the identity-defining role of written artefacts, and the transformation of written heritage over times so that it remains meaningful as part of the cultural identity of future generations.

At the present moment, these include

• the newly added ‘Kairouan Manuscript Project’ which facilitates the care and management, study, and promotion of the Kairouan collection, one of the most important collections of Islamic manuscripts in the world
• ‘Preserving the Written Cultural Heritage of Nepal’, a project aiming to preserve Nepal’s unique manuscript collections that offer an invaluable account of the country’s rich cultural, religious, and historical heritage
• the ‘Digital Repository of Endangered and Affected Manuscripts in Southeast Asia (DREAMSEA)’, a programme that aims to preserve Southeast Asian manuscripts and their contents in order to make these immense cultural treasures available to the world
• ‘Safeguarding the Manuscripts of Timbuktu’, a project that ran from 2012 to 2019 in order to save a large group of more than 300,000 manuscript items that had been transferred from Timbuktu to Bamako in response to the threat posed by radical Islamist rebels during the period of political and civil unrest in Northern Mali
• the new publication series Written Artefacts as Cultural Heritage. Through a mix of practical guides, colloquium papers and project reports, this series is dedicated to the double role of written artefacts as representations and generators of humankind’s cultural heritage. Its thematic scope embraces aspects of preservation, the identity-defining role of artefacts as well as ethical questions