Visit the Digital Vatican
November 5, 2014
The Vatican possesses one of the most extensive historical and religious archives in the world. Researchers are eager to visit the archive and read the documents. The Vatican, however, is selective about visitors due to the documents’ fragility and age. Message To Eagle, a paranormal and historical news blog, reports in the post “Vatican Library Puts 4,000 Manuscripts Available Online For Free” about how the Vatican is going digital.
The Vatican Apostolic Library will digitize 3000 records and people will be able to view them for free via the Web. The records will be stored in the DigitaVaticana program, which is based on a format designed by NASA to store images and astronomical data. Prior to the new digitization efforts, there were only 1100 records available online of the over 80000 items in the library. The current digital library is outdated and requires users to manually click through each file in order to view an item image. The new system will include a new search tool and be more graphics heavy.
To complete this task, the Vatican will draw on its own funds as well as crowdfunding to complete the project. They estimate it will take 50 million euros, over fifteen years, and 150 experts to digitize the entire library.
“The Vatican writes on the DigitaVaticana website, ‘Thanks to technology we can preserve the past and bequeath it to the future. The manuscripts will be freely available to everyone on the Vatican Library website and the world’s knowledge will truly become humanity’s heritage.’ “
Whitney Grace, November 05, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
Comments
One Response to “Visit the Digital Vatican”
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
[…] Visit the Digital Vatican […]