This study aims to preserve and save the scientific treasures of the scholars of the archipelago in the form of coastal ancient manuscripts at the Jami' Lasem Mosque Library, Rembang. The condition of the ancient manuscripts is now damaged, weathered due to age. If not saved immediately, the contents of the manuscript will be damaged and unreadable. Though the contents are very useful for today's life. The effort that needs to be done is to digitize the manuscript, while the original manuscript can be preserved by means of preservation. Digitization is not only to preserve the contents of the manuscript but also to maintain health and the environment. We managed to digitize four of the 14 manuscripts in the Lasem Mosque library. The potential of ancient manuscripts in Lasem still needs to be traced again considering that Lasem is an old city where an old pesantren was founded in Java.

Ontologically, interpreting a limited heritage city as a natural object is not appropriate. It is also an adaptive and ideational system structure in reality as a cultural entity. The results of previous studies provide an implicit explanation for the erroneous paradox about heritage cities from stakeholders. The realization of the Heritage City Structuring and Preservation Program (P3KP) in Indonesia reveals policies that fall too deeply on positivistic epistomology, in addition to the lack of accommodating interpretive epistemology, as was the case in Lasem. As a result, the orientation of the program is too concerned with things of a technical nature and becomes inclined to rigid towards the effort of understanding (verstehen) social phenomena, looking for concepts by grounded, and categorizing. The uniqueness or einmalig of the importance of preserving ancient manuscripts fails to be captured carefully. The paradigm—viewed from a philological perspective—that saving the physicality of the manuscript means also saving the invaluable wealth of civilization contained in the text needs to be rethought. With the principle of emancipatory and participatory, in order to increase critical awareness for the freedom of society, this research was compiled as a idiological critique of Jurgen Habermas-style with the Participatory Action Research (PAR) method. The results of the research are expected to encourage the formation of new awareness behind the making of related policies in the future.