The private manuscript libraries of Yemen, estimated at 50,000 codices, constitutes the largest and most important set of unexamined Arabic manuscripts in the world today. Until recently, these sources were unavailable to anyone outside the Zaydi community in Northern Yemen. Now, due to the efforts of the Imam Zaid bin ‘Ali Cultural Foundation, The Yemeni Manuscript Digitization Initiative (ymdi.uoregon.edu) and its partner institutions Princeton University Library and Free University, Berlin, for the first time, manuscripts from three private libraries in Sanaa, Yemen will be freely available on the web through the Princeton University Digital Library (http://pudl.princeton.edu/collections/pudl0079). In this talk I will describe the status of the project to this point, the challenges the current situation in Yemen presents, and the potential for scholarship the dissemination of this new knowledge presents.