Awesome Archival!

Our Awesome Archival today is a digitization project that allows anyone access to Maimonides's code of Jewish Law. The following excerpt is from Language Hat.

The Bodleian Libraries are the proud custodian of Maimonides' authorized manuscript copy of his major halachic work, the Mishneh Torah, a code meant to collect disparate rulings and to present them "succinctly and clearly, so that all the Oral Torah will be easily accessible to all." ... A later owner of the copy, a certain Eleazar, son of Perahya, stipulated in his will that this and the other volumes of the Code (now lost) should remain in the public domain for consultation....

The manuscript is now as public as it gets. The scan is archival quality, which means you can see scuffs, stains, and so on at a high zoom rate. There are a lot of similar digitization projects taking place all over the world, providing the general population access to documents that until recently have required a great deal of work in terms of access permissions and travel to get to.