At the present time there are between two and three million manuscripts in Arabic characters in the world.

This figure could seem high, but it is constantly declining. Natural fatigue, humidity, rodents, accidents and intentional destruction, wars, all are each day taking away their lot of mss.

Once reduced to nothingness, a ms disappears forever - there is no way to replace this unique container of memory.

Additionally, an important part of the existing mss are inaccessible, be it only for the geographical distribution of the collections which are holding them and the travel budget implied.

Therefore the results of projects such as «Manuscript Heritage» is both to rescue and preserve mss, as to make them known.