Characteristics Of The Malay Manuscript

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Malay Manuscript is a handwritten document in Jawi scripts, which is generated within the early 16th century until the beginning of the 20th century. The Malay Manuscript covered a wide range of subject matter includes literature, historiography, laws and legislation, letters, traditional medicine, poem, religious texts, tips, talisman, horoscope, storytelling fortune and so on. Manuscripts generally refer to unpublished original sources and have the characteristic of being unique. Currently, many of these invaluable sources are physically stored in secure archives and are accessible in a very restricted way to a handful of experts only, due to their fragile nature. The article wrote by Mohd Hilmi Md Rifin and A. N. Zainab titled Creating …show more content…

Ding (1993) mentioned that, an increasing number of Malay manuscripts in libraries, especially those in private collections, are disintegrating. This problem has been with the Malay World since the very beginning. Deterioration may be due to acid embrittlement of the paper, unsuitable storage environment, biological attacks or human negligence and mishandling. A number of these manuscripts are already brittle to a point of being unusable. As mentioned by Aytac (2002), flooding, terrorism, bomb threats, explosions, transportation accidents, earthquakes, fire and war also prove dangerous threats to the written cultural heritage. And because of this, the author also stated that the world cultural heritage is continually at risk because of natural and unnatural disasters. Thus, the development of a digital library of Malay manuscripts would provide significant insurance against the loss of these valuable materials for use in the learning community. According to Mohd Hilmi Md Rifin and A. N. Zainab, Many digital library initiatives focus on preserving various cultural heritages. Often, the initiatives comprise of various materials such as pictures, maps and paintings, and manuscripts are one of the materials included. Shafi (2004) listed some

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