Making use of the extensive international network of the cultural heritage experts of Cultural Emergency Response, this co-funded initiative provides grants directly to collections in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean to safeguard documentary heritage that is acutely threatened by recent conflict or other disaster, whether natural or man-made.

In response to urgent requests from colleagues at museums in Iraq, The Met designed a portable kit containing all of the camera and lighting equipment, electronics, software, and power required for high-quality photography of heritage objects. They have trained and equipped a dozen local professionals, who are now documenting and publishing their holdings. The rich catalogs they create will help protect against loss from looting and allow the museums to share their collections widely.

The Antiochian (Greek) Orthodox Church in Syria requested the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library’s assistance in preserving more than a thousand secular and religious manuscripts housed in ecclesiastical collections in Damascus, Hama, and Latakia, and written in Greek, Syriac, and Arabic. This project reactivated HMML’s work in Syria, where they partnered with local organizations to provide training and equipment to digitize manuscripts from 2003 to 2012, when conflict in the country forced a suspension of the work.

The occupation of Mosul and northern Iraq by ISIS took a profound toll on the region’s citizens and infrastructure, including the remarkable intellectual record of this important cultural capital. As part of the recovery effort, ASOR-CHI collaborated with the Digital Center for Eastern Manuscripts and the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library to train and equip Iraqi heritage professionals to digitize a wide range of significant manuscripts, historical records, photographs, newspapers, and archaeological documents..

The DLME is an ambitious project to connect the digital repositories of Middle Eastern cultural heritage currently siloed around the globe by creating a central portal empowering anyone with an internet connection to easily search and discover these collections. The guiding principle of the project is service to people in the region: to help reveal, share, and protect cultural materials and the living and historical cultures they represent. An initial technical proof-of-concept launched publicly on January 31, 2018.

Leading scientists at the Rochester Institute of Technology and the University of Rochester's Lazarus Project have partnered with Colombia's National Library and a host of other documentary collections in the country to train and equip local stewards to deploy a new low-cost multispectral imaging system - a noninvasive technology that can reveal erased and eroded text - on some of Colombia's most significant manuscripts and documents.