The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

It's a terrible shame what happened to Mali -- until the collapse of Libya it was a stable, if terribly poor, democratic state. The return of militant Tuaregs (now armed with the weapons Qadhdhafi had outfitted them with as his personal militia) and the merging of al-Qai'da in the Maghreb with Algerian tribes created a fertile soil for extremist violence.

Timbuktu was once a great center of learning and commerce, at the heart of a sophisticated West African empire. These neo-Kharijites have nothing but contempt for history.

What happened is also a warning. Hopefully the digitization process will be accelerated as a result.

What is more surprising is how big the collection is (~500k is spoken of) yet how few of them have actually been translated and read.

One of the first American novels was about Timbuktu (though fictional, as novels often are)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Algerine_Captive

Aren't novels fiction by definition?

recent talk at google https://youtu.be/Ag9OLc7I_YM