The manuscripts were passed down in Timbuktu families and were mostly in poor condition. Most of the manuscripts remain unstudied and uncatalogued, and their total number is unknown, affording only rough estimates. A selection of about 160 manuscripts from the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library in Timbuktu and the Ahmed Baba collection were digitized by the "Tombouctou Manuscripts Project" in the 2000s. Beginning in 2013, the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John's University in Collegeville, Minnesota, partnered with SAVAMA-DCI for a large-scale digitization effort that has photographed more than 150,000 manuscripts. This effort has been supported by the Arcadia Fund. These are being made available through HMML's online Reading Room. In 2017, HMML and the British Library's Endangered Archives Programme launched the Endangered Libraries in Timbuktu (ELIT) project to digitize manuscripts that remained in Timbuktu with the three principal mosques.