Manuscripts are the main source of our cultures and their historical development. Beyond their texts and images their chemical and physical composition contains a wealth of non-textual information that waits to be properly exploited in order to reveal their history of production, storage (e.g. the ancient and medieval libraries), rewriting (palimpsests), modern conservation as well as the history of transmission. Many manuscripts are difficult to decipher, extremely fragmentary (Qumran, Egyptian Turin papyri), dismembered or dispersed over many collections (e.g. the Geniza). New chemical and physical analyses, imaging methods and techniques from computer sciences can add their share to classical philology, palaeography, codicology, linguistics or history. Conceiving collective open source infrastructures to handle big data has become a crucial issue to prepare the questions of the near future. Identifying, recovering, putting together, completing the puzzles, revealing, restoring, conserving, digitizing of manuscripts is the challenge to accept and to beat. Frequently, however, scholars are not well acquainted with the limits and possibilities of recent techniques while scientists do not have the cultural knowledge to select artifacts and pose historical questions. Only a multidisciplinary approach combining classical philology, material sciences and computer sciences can achieve the goal. Therefore, we want to bring together young and experienced scientists, from master's and Ph.D. students to university lecturers, historians, philologists, palaeographers, linguists, cultural scientists, scholars from the humanities in general and conservators specialized in manuscripts with natural scientists, archaeometrists, chemists and physicists, as well as IT specialists. Besides lectures on the fundamentals of the techniques and the historic and cultural background, special practical courses will be given on portable instruments and computer simulations and analysis. Successful participation can be acknowledged with 5 ECTS points when a handed-in protocol on one of the practical courses is accepted by the Fachbereich Physik and a 20-min review is successfully presented in an additional seminar session in the Fachbereich Physik in the last week of September..