In 1971 heavy rain brought down part of the western wall of the Great Mosque of Sana'a, and repair work the following year opened a space between the ceiling and the roof packed with parchment and paper. The material had been placed there rather than destroyed, which is the usual respectful disposal for a worn Quran. Estimates of what came out run to twelve or fifteen thousand parchment fragments, from close to a thousand different manuscript volumes, most of them of the seventh to the eleventh centuries.
For years the fragments sat in storage. A conservation project funded by the German government and run with the Yemeni antiquities authorities began in 1980, and Ursula Dreibholz worked as its conservator in Sana'a from 1982 to the end of 1989. The decision that shaped everything after it was to treat the material in Yemen rather than send it abroad. That meant building the facilities and training the staff on site, and one Yemeni conservator, Abd al-Wahid al-Shami, was trained in German libraries for the purpose.
The House of Manuscripts, in the old city opposite the mosque, is what that project left behind: conservation and photographic workrooms, storage designed around the fragments using flat housing in the traditional Islamic manner in acid free materials, and a room where a selection of the leaves can be seen. The treatment was deliberately conservative, cleaning, humidifying and flattening rather than anything irreversible.