Protecting Tattered Manuscripts on Film and Disk

The Ancient Biblical Manuscript Center (ABMC) holds one of the world’s largest collections of ancient biblical and related manuscripts on film. These manuscripts are priceless relics of our religious and cultural heritage. But they are also more than that: Documents like the Leningrad Codex, along with thousands of others, continue to influence modern biblical translations and commentaries—by filling in gaps in the text and providing variant readings crucial to reconstructing the Bible’s history.

An important way to preserve these tattered and decomposing documents is through photographic and digital images. That is what the ABMC is dedicated to accomplishing. Its mission is to make photographic (and now digital) records of old manuscripts, to preserve the records in the safest possible way and to make them available to all who request them, in cooperation with the institutions that own the original documents.

These materials can be handled and studied without damaging the original documents. Further, if some disaster—say, water damage or fire—befalls a precious rare manuscript, its text will remain preserved in the images. Copies of photos and digital images also allow researchers to study ancient documents without traveling to a rare book room or museum archive, vastly expanding access to our common cultural heritage.