Google becomes home to priceless Timbuktu manuscripts

Tens of thousands of precious manuscripts from the city of Timbuktu, in Mali, have been made available on Google for the first time.

Located in the West African nation of Mali, the name Timbuktu has come to embody the idea of a distant place, but this city was once famed as a center of learning, religion and trade. Today it's still known for its imposing earthen mosques, and the hundreds of thousands of scholarly manuscripts held in public and private collections.

Those manuscripts have had a turbulent past, threatened by Islamist rebels and irrevocable loss. Now, thanks to local residents and global academics, over 40,000 pages spanning the 11th to the 20th Century have been preserved for good in Google Arts and Culture's "Mali Magic" portal -- a compendium of digitized artifacts, many of which have never been publicly available before.