Thomas Gruner didn’t know Timbuktu was a real town when it was drawn to his attention by the hacker community. They had seen a campaign on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo called T160K to raise money to protect several hundred thousand historic manuscripts that had been evacuated from the al-Qaida-occupied north of Mali but were now at risk of rotting in the humid climate of the capital, Bamako.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/01/crowdfunding-timbuktu-manuscripts-african-culture