Hall & Stewart (2011) mounted evidence for a common ‘core curriculum’ undergirding teaching and writing in Islamic West Africa, and Stewart (2018) set out a methodology for calibrating the past 400 years of scholarship there based on derivative writing by West African authors and the contents of library holdings across the Sahel. Both studies drew on the AMMS database of West African manuscripts upon which the validity of both projects hinge. This paper examines whether that database is, indeed, representative of West Africa’s manuscript culture. Recent enhancements to AMMS has converted it into a relational database in preparation for its move to the UC Berkeley Library in 2018 where it will be hosted as an open-access resource. Thanks to the upgrades, we now have some evidence that AMMS may contain over 90% of the roughly 5,000 extant authors and their sources that make up the past 400 years of West Africa’s manuscript culture, with about 2/3 being West African authors. Knowing the parameters of this literary corpus opens a new range of question-framing and analysis for the intellectual history of Islamic West Africa. This paper offers evidence for the near-comprehensive nature of the AMMS author data and poses questions that this resource may also help us solve.