WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

1
00:00:00.699 --> 00:00:06.220
The National Medal for Museum and Library
services is the nation’s highest honor for

2
00:00:06.220 --> 00:00:11.519
libraries and museums that are serving their
communities in exciting ways.

3
00:00:11.519 --> 00:00:17.020
Hill Museum & Manuscript Library director
Father Columba Stewart and community member

4
00:00:17.020 --> 00:00:21.940
Dr. Getachew Haile traveled to Washington
to receive the national medal and spoke to

5
00:00:21.940 --> 00:00:25.360
IMLS about how the library impacts the community.

6
00:00:25.360 --> 00:00:30.170
Father Columbus Stewart: So we are a sponsored
program of St. John’s Abbey and University

7
00:00:30.170 --> 00:00:34.570
which was founded by Benedict of monks in
1856.

8
00:00:34.570 --> 00:00:39.340
And in the 1960’s some of our community
began to be very worried about what would

9
00:00:39.340 --> 00:00:42.940
happen to monastic libraries in Europe.

10
00:00:42.940 --> 00:00:45.120
There had been two world wars; there had been
a lot of loss.

11
00:00:45.120 --> 00:00:51.310
It was the time of the cold war monasteries
in places like Austria and Germany were potentially

12
00:00:51.310 --> 00:00:54.000
on the front line of a nuclear war.

13
00:00:54.000 --> 00:00:59.720
And so the idea was to apply what at that
time was cutting edge technology, 35mm micro

14
00:00:59.720 --> 00:01:04.170
film, to go and photograph these manuscripts,
just in case.

15
00:01:04.170 --> 00:01:08.560
But very quickly the value of the project
was evident for other places.

16
00:01:08.560 --> 00:01:13.969
So we started work in Ethiopia before its
revolution, because you had this incredible

17
00:01:13.969 --> 00:01:18.799
Christian culture little studied and then
the wisdom of the project was proved when

18
00:01:18.799 --> 00:01:24.829
the country was engulfed in revolution, dictatorships,
civil war and many of the manuscripts we photographed

19
00:01:24.829 --> 00:01:25.829
disappeared.

20
00:01:25.829 --> 00:01:32.280
Dr. Getachew Haile: I left Ethiopia because
of political situation there.

21
00:01:32.280 --> 00:01:39.399
At that time it was a military junta which
was ruling the country.

22
00:01:39.399 --> 00:01:45.289
And there was no freedom of speech there was
no freedom at all so we started revolting

23
00:01:45.289 --> 00:01:49.130
against, protesting the oppression.

24
00:01:49.130 --> 00:01:56.869
So that is why they attacked me and left me
on a wheel chair.

25
00:01:56.869 --> 00:02:03.039
So I left the country to come here at St.
John’s University to catalogue the manuscripts

26
00:02:03.039 --> 00:02:04.039
they have.

27
00:02:04.039 --> 00:02:10.729
They have scholars of Christianity who would
like to know what books that have been translated,

28
00:02:10.729 --> 00:02:17.450
if any of them have been lost in other countries;
they might be found in this translation in

29
00:02:17.450 --> 00:02:18.450
Ethiopia.

30
00:02:18.450 --> 00:02:25.410
The project, the principal of the work is
to go to the monastery, microfilm them and

31
00:02:25.410 --> 00:02:28.879
leave the books there, bring the microfilm
here.

32
00:02:28.879 --> 00:02:32.659
Father Columbia Stewart: In more recent years
we have done two things.

33
00:02:32.659 --> 00:02:37.360
We have switched to high color or high quality
color digital imaging.

34
00:02:37.360 --> 00:02:41.540
So Getachew came to St. John’s in the 1970’s
to work with microfilm.

35
00:02:41.540 --> 00:02:47.459
Now we have people in locations around the
world simply working with digital images and

36
00:02:47.459 --> 00:02:51.659
sending in their catalogue and data that we
can put into our database.

37
00:02:51.659 --> 00:02:59.640
All of these places are remarkable in different
ways, many of them are known to western scholars

38
00:02:59.640 --> 00:03:05.159
or the existence of their manuscripts is known,
but they have been inaccessible.

39
00:03:05.159 --> 00:03:09.310
And we’ve had the experience of finding
manuscript collections that people have forgotten

40
00:03:09.310 --> 00:03:10.310
about.

41
00:03:10.310 --> 00:03:15.340
Manuscript collections had been moved and
nobody had seen for decades or in some cases

42
00:03:15.340 --> 00:03:17.340
over a century ago.

43
00:03:17.340 --> 00:03:21.830
And then finding collections that no one in
the west at least ever knew existed.

44
00:03:21.830 --> 00:03:26.480
So we are expecting all kinds of discoveries
from manuscripts we’re photographing in

45
00:03:26.480 --> 00:03:33.630
Syria, Iraq, India comparable to what Getachew’s
found in the Ethiopian manuscripts, text previously

46
00:03:33.630 --> 00:03:37.470
unknown, the oldest known copies of books
of the Ethiopian Bible.

47
00:03:37.470 --> 00:03:43.819
We are finding things like that in Syriac,
in Armenian, in Christian Arabic and it’s

48
00:03:43.819 --> 00:03:49.090
only when the catalogers sit down and do this
patient work that Getachew does, that these

49
00:03:49.090 --> 00:03:51.590
manuscripts speak again.

50
00:03:51.590 --> 00:03:55.150
And there could be remarkable things there.

51
00:03:55.150 --> 00:03:58.849
So we microfilmed 93,000 manuscripts until
2003.

52
00:03:58.849 --> 00:04:04.849
Getachew is still working on the 8000 Ethiopian
manuscripts that were microfilmed in that

53
00:04:04.849 --> 00:04:06.030
time.

54
00:04:06.030 --> 00:04:13.650
Since 2003 we have photographed over 30,000
manuscripts in high quality digital imaging.

55
00:04:13.650 --> 00:04:15.190
So that’s what we are going through now.

56
00:04:15.190 --> 00:04:17.240
And what we are going to find there?

57
00:04:17.240 --> 00:04:19.359
Who knows, but it’s surely going to be remarkable.
�