The Illinois Archives is full of unique accounts of histories and societies from all over the world, including a collection of Mauritanian manuscripts from the early 1800s that were microfilmed by Professor Emeritus Charles C. Stewart nearly 30 years ago. The collection includes 2,054 works from the libraries of Harun b. Baba b. Sidi Muhammad b. Sidiyya al-Ntishai'i, Ismail b. Baba, and Ya'qub. Laila Hussain Moustafa, Assistant Professor of Library Administration and the Middle East and North Africa subject specialist in the International Area Studies Library, has been working to preserve each of the nearly 10,000 pages by turning them into digitized copies that can be transferred to other searchable formats in the future.