Preserving the priceless manuscripts of Timbuktu

Monica Villamizar:

Haidara, whose family also owns an important collection of manuscripts, has digitized 20 percent of nearly 200,000 documents.

The originals are kept in this room, classified by family and year. They deal with myriad subjects, astronomy and physics, politics and magic.

These gentlemen you see are reading page by page of each book, and they are making notes, like a summary of what it says.

But time is running out. The books survived for centuries thanks to the dry desert of Timbuktu, but now live in the heavy, tropical climate of Bamako, Mali's capital.

Timbuktu and Northern Mali, still plagued by conflict, remains a no-go area.

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