05/18/2026
Today, museums worldwide mark International Museum Day ( ) under the theme “Museums Uniting a Divided World”. The theme highlights the potential of museums to act as bridges across cultural, social, and geopolitical divides, fostering dialogue, understanding, inclusion and peace within and between communities worldwide.
HMML was founded in 1964 as the “Monastic Microfilm Project,” to photograph at-risk collections of manuscripts for long-term preservation and access.
With memories of World War II still vivid, and fearing the outbreak of nuclear war in Europe, the monastic leadership of Saint John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota, considered what they could do to help prevent the destruction of cultural heritage.
In 1964, Fr. Colman Barry, OBS, became president of Saint John’s University and proposed a project to create microfilm copies of medieval manuscripts located in European Benedictine monasteries—to preserve the contents of these unique documents and to give scholars wider opportunity to study them. Fr. Colman consulted with Fr. Oliver Kapsner, OSB, and Abbot Baldwin Dworschak, OSB, who agreed that the project would be an excellent undertaking for Saint John’s.
The project became a program of Saint John’s University that same year, under the name the “Monastic Manuscript Microfilm Library” (MMML). Microfilming began in Austria in April 1965 under the direction of Fr. Oliver. The work quickly spread beyond the scope of Benedictine libraries to include other religious orders and non-monastic libraries. A major preservation project began in Ethiopia in the 1970s, and in 2003 HMML began working in the Middle East, followed soon after by work in Asia. Today, HMML has preservation partnerships in Africa, Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and North America.
The ravages of time, fire, natural disasters, persecution, political upheaval, technological change, and neglect have been the principal historic threats to the survival of manuscripts. Manuscripts are also subject to theft or illegal export, especially in conflict zones. In some locations, manuscripts are targeted for destruction by forces intent upon erasing the history and cultural identity of ancient communities.
When partnering with repositories with at-risk collections, HMML works with local communities to create photographic copies of their manuscript collections. These photographs preserve the content of the manuscripts, provide access outside of the library, and can be evidence of a manuscript’s existence if the collections are relocated, lost, or destroyed. By making these manuscript photographs available online in HMML Reading Room (vhmml.org), people worldwide are provided with long-term access to the collections.
Every day, we see the way that collective access to these manuscripts forms bridges across cultural, social, and geopolitical divides. By listening to one another—through the manuscripts and in our work together—we hope to foster dialogue, understanding, inclusion, and peace.
Learn more about HMML's work: hmml.org/about/faq
Pictured: a fragment of Bello’s history of the Hausa region, Infāq al-maysūr fī tārīkh bilād al-takrūr. (SAV BMH 14522, page 26). Learn more in a story about Banned Books, authored by Dr. Paul Naylor, cataloger of West African manuscripts at HMML: hmml.org/stories/series-books-unreliable-books
