Sunday, October 26, 2014

The Vatican Digitizes Manuscripts

From PBS:
One of the oldest libraries on the planet is digitizing its archive of ancient manuscripts — and they’re all available to view free of charge. The Vatican Apostolic Library is undertaking an extensive digital preservation of its 82,000 document collection. Over the course of a few years, with the assistance of Japanese company NTT DATA, the library has catalogued nearly 4,500 manuscripts online — and it hopes to reach the 15,000 mark within the next four years.

Monsignor Cesare Pasini, Prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library, called the project a “true effort in favour of the conservation and dissemination of knowledge at the service of culture throughout the world;” writing on the library’s site that the project could eventually lead to 40 million digitized pages and 43 petabytes worth of data. The entire undertaking is expected to take at least 15 years and cost more than $63 million dollars — an effort the Vatican Library is attempting to support, in part, by crowdsourcing funding. (Read more.)
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2 comments:

Lauriana said...

Wow, that is so cool!
As far as I know, the records of the Vatican provide a great source of material for historians etc.
And now, it will become so much more readily available... Great!
I'm just wondering: Are they making a selection when digitizing documents or is there an intention to digitize the whole archive?

elena maria vidal said...

I think they plan on doing everything. I'll have to read the article again....