Can anyone imagine the amount of money the Knights of the Order of St John could have raised had they had a website?
This intriguing scenario was put to me by Theresa Vann, curator of the Malta Study Centre at the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library (HMML) at St John's University in Minnesota, USA.
Dr Vann is in Malta as a Fulbright scholar.
The conjecture she puts across during our conversation is based on the theme of the book she is writing about the Knights of St John in Rhodes.
After the Knights prevailed in the 1480 siege by the Ottoman Turks, the Order commissioned its chancellor to write an official history of the siege and had copies of that history circulated all over Europe in order to raise money.
"It's like a 15th century PR and fundraising exercise," Dr Vann noted, smiling broadly.
Incidentally, all the sources for mediaeval Rhodes are preserved in Malta - the Knights brought over the archives to Malta after the Ottomans expelled them from Rhodes years after the siege.
St John's University and its College of St Benedict are part of the Benedictine patrimony in the US and where the HMML originated.
HMML was set up "to ensure that the hand-written record of human experience, wisdom and creativity will be a resource for future generations; HMML preserves manuscripts, promotes their study, and teaches about the cultures that produced them".
A tall order indeed, seeing that the library has over the past 35 years microfilmed more than 25 million pages of mediaeval and early modern manuscripts.
The library makes copies of Christian as well as Islamic archives and is currently microfilming in Lebanon, where the Christian archives are in danger of being lost.
The library has filmed the national libraries in Austria, Malta and Portugal. It is currently filming the mediaeval manuscripts in Stockholm and has filmed extensively in England, Germany, Switzerland, South Africa and Ethiopia.
As a result of civil unrest in Ethiopia, a number of original archives have been lost since the HMML carried out the microfilming exercise.
The Benedictine monastic tradition, in which part of the rule is to worship and work, goes back 900 years. Historically, part of the work of the Order of the Benedictines was copying manuscripts and preserving them in scriptoria in the monasteries.
The Benedictine monks went to Minnesota in the 19th century, set up St John's Abbey and established a university on the grounds of the abbey.
"Back in the late 1950s to early 1960s, the president of the university, Fr Coleman Barry, was concerned about how many libraries had been destroyed during World War Two in Europe.
"When he visited Pope Pius XII, the pope asked him what the Benedictine Order was going to do about this. At the time, the best way to preserve manuscripts was to microfilm them," Dr Vann recounted.
The HMML began operating in 1965 and in the case of Malta it has microfilmed over 22,000 manuscripts and archival materials.
"The work on the ecclesiastical archives in Mdina which started in 1973 is really the work of Mgr John Azzopardi. He was involved in it from the very beginning and he was our field director, doing tremendous work.
"He found that there were archives kept in stables. He sorted them. They were full of mould and insects - it was hazardous to his health.
"He identified archives in Mdina, convinced private owners to have their materials microfilmed, and worked with parishes and religious orders to have their archives filmed."
The ecclesiastical archives go back to the 15th century and contain a lot of information on the social history of Malta. The music collection, on the other hand, which is not published anywhere else, is extremely rich.
Although microfilms have a life span of 400 years, they have to be stored in a cool dry place. The high humidity levels in Malta wreak havoc with such films unless they are stored in a climate-controlled state, which often is not the case here.
HMML has reached a point now where they can convert the microfilm into a digital format and make it available that way to users.
At 5.30 p.m. today Dr Vann will be delivering a public lecture at the Malta Centre for Restoration in Bighi on where the Malta project is now and the way forward.
www.hmml.org
www.hmml.org/centres/malta