Jerusalem/Books, Bridges of peace

The San Salvatore Library, currently the General Library of the Custody of the Holy Land, has existed since the fifteenth century. The treasure it preserves, particularly the manuscripts, is of great artistic and historical significance, allowing us to trace the history of the Minorite order in the Holy Land since the Middle Ages.
The Studium Biblicum Franciscanum Library was founded around the beginning of the twentieth century, at the same time as the school dedicated to the study of the Holy Scriptures and biblical archeology. Since 1963, the Studium Biblicum has been part of the Antonianum pontifical university in Rome. The library’s book collection is valuable because of its scope, which includes 400 titles of periodicals and magazines.
Since 2011, the Pro Terra Sancta Association has been working on the ‘Books, Bridges of Peace’ initiative, which aims to preserve this vast and priceless cultural heritage. Pro Terra Sancta has compiled an updated catalog of volumes in libraries, as well as maintaining an online version; it has created an inventory, cataloged, and examined the most culturally significant collections, and has made them available for study owing to local personnel’s training. In 2020, 400 academics will be able to take advantage of the project’s services.
All of these accomplishments were made possible through a collaboration with the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan’s Book Publishing and Library Research Center (CRELEB). Edoardo Barbieri, a professor of archivistics at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, has been a key contributor to the project for a long time.