Digital Preservation and Language Technology Integration for Full-Text Retrieval of Old Arewa Kingdom Manuscripts

The manuscript heritage of the Old Arewa Kingdom in Northern Nigeria forms a significant intellectual archive reflecting centuries of Islamic scholarship, governance, and cultural life in West Africa. These manuscripts appear in multiple scripts and languages, including Arabic, Hausa Ajami, Fulfulde Ajami, Kanuri, and Roman-script Hausa. Although digitisation initiatives have expanded across Nigerian archival institutions, most collections remain accessible mainly as image archives with limited search capability. This study examines the implementation of digital preservation and language technologies required for full-text retrieval in institutions preserving Old Arewa manuscripts. A survey of national, state, and university repositories shows that while basic digitisation tools are widely adopted, key components for searchable repositories remain underdeveloped. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for Arabic and Ajami scripts, multilingual metadata systems, and Unicode-compliant infrastructures are insufficiently implemented. The study argues that sustainable preservation requires moving from image-based digitisation to integrated digital ecosystems combining Unicode standardization, AI-assisted text recognition, and multilingual metadata frameworks.