Digitization has tended to be idealized as the savior for historic manuscripts in the MENA region. It has been promoted by important world bodies such as UNESCO, which in its 2012 Vancouver Declaration, wrote that while digitization is “not in itself a major means of preservation,” it was “for some types of material, …the only means of ensuring their survival” . It is often assumed that once digitized, historical documents will be made available unconditionally on the internet. However, in the case of manuscripts held by private owners in North Africa, preservation, and not public access generally motivate the desire for digitization. In Morocco, where manuscripts are family heirlooms and sometimes the only wealth an ancestor may have left their descendants (Benjelloun-Laroui 1990), digitization can be seen as a loss of possession. Furthermore, ideas such as “the democratization of access” to digitized manuscripts or of “world heritage” (versus local owner rights), add complexity to the scenario in MENA where large numbers of historic documents are in various states of deterioration. For Bowery and Anderson (2009) “the ideals of global sharing masks historical, political and cultural tensions.” In North Africa, part of the tension stems from a colonial past where French authorities confiscated manuscripts , causing Moroccans to bury or otherwise conceal their valuable documents in order to “save” them from colonial hands. This paper explores the divergence between the perspective of international digitization initiatives, which often demand a copy of the manuscripts they digitize, and private manuscript owners for whom the perceived loss of ownership makes digitization prohibitive. It hopes to inform more owner-sensitive digitization policies that take region and historic context into consideration so that digitization is not a “new form of imperialism” whereby Western countries loot the material heritage of developing countries “in the name of preservation” (Pickover and Peters 2002).