Vatican to Digitize 41 Million Pages of Ancient Manuscripts

http://hyperallergic.com/117932/vatican-to-digitize-41-million-pages-of-ancient-manuscripts/

by jamesbritt • 12 years ago

222 60 12 years ago

From the original press release[1]:

The project consists of an initial four-year phase during which three thousand manuscripts will be digitised, which may be extended into a second phase to include the 82,000 volumes – more than 40 million pages – of manuscripts preserved in the Library and dating from between the second and twentieth centuries.

It's going to be slow but it's a step in the right direction.

[1] http://www.news.va/en/news/agreement-to-digitise-82000-manus...

quanticle• 12 years ago

Slowness isn't surprising. These books are old and one-of-a-kind. Even with the best technology, it's still a very delicate process to scan them without damaging them. Some of these works are so old, that even the wrong kind of light will hurt them.

pjungwir• 12 years ago

I got to spend a few days once visiting St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, one of the oldest monasteries in the world, which is famous for having never been sacked. The Codex Sinaiticus was found there, one of the two oldest complete manuscripts of the Bible. It also has some of the only surviving iconography in the world from before the iconoclast period.

Their librarian is American from Boston, and he has been digitizing their library for several years now. My traveling companion was also a Boston librarian, and we had an amazing tour of the library. It was very strange to see, surrounded by ancient stone walls and crumbling manuscripts, top-of-the-line Macs, shelves of USB drives, and a giant digital camera in a room-size metal frame, with a cradle for resting books on.

I'm delighted to hear more such works are being preserved!

bane• 12 years ago

There's something strangely appropriate about old books and works of art and high-tech in the same space. It feels like you're present in a continuous stream of thought from ancient to present.

dhughes• 12 years ago

I find it amazing that the books and manuscripts are still around hundreds if not a thousand years later meanwhile the dye medium of my data CDs from the mid 90s is probably rotten.

joshdance• 12 years ago

Check out Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, for a novel about exactly that - http://www.robinsloan.com/penumbra/

Mikeb85• 12 years ago

No matter what your feelings are about religion, this is a great thing for humanity in general. The preservation of ancient manuscripts only makes us richer.

duaneb• 12 years ago

It's sad you have to qualify it—religion is part of all our past, whatever our opinions of it now, and it will only increase our wisdom to understand our ancestors.

nsxwolf• 12 years ago

It's also very much a part of our present, perhaps Silicon Valley not withstanding.

tokipin• 12 years ago

personally i hope it highlights how arbitrary all the writings are.

protomyth2• 12 years ago

The announcement http://www.news.va/en/news/agreement-to-digitise-82000-manus...

jonah2• 12 years ago

They already have some things from their catalog digitized.

e.g. http://www.mss.vatlib.it/guii/scan/link.jsp

http://www.vaticanlibrary.va/home.php?pag=cataloghi_online

ryannevius• 12 years ago

Awesome! Do you have any idea what licensing / re-use / fair use of this content is? For example, would I be able to take these scans and build a digital product (e.g. web / desktop app) around them? Could I print one out and put it on a t-shirt? Etc.

Something tells me "definitely not"...but I wasn't able to find anything conclusive on the site.

jonah2• 12 years ago

They site footer has a copyright notice. I'd say contact them - they may be open for non-commercial use.

earksiinni6• 12 years ago

You can get copies from the Archives for research purposes but it isn't cheap. I forget how much it cost when I was last there doing research. Also, they probably wouldn't grant permission for the purpose of making t-shirts, just my guess...=)

kimmel• 12 years ago

They are watermarking scans of items that are not in copyright since they predate the copyright system. What kind of bullshit is this?

These should all be public domain. Is there anyone besides Google and the Vatican that watermark public domain works?

fhars• 12 years ago

The reproduction itself is still a protected work, but you are free to reproduce the content if you copy it from the original or a reproduction that is no longer protected (i.e. older than 50 years in most jurisdictions I know about).

ternaryoperator• 12 years ago

Scans are photographs. Sad, but true, in this particular case.

Kliment• 12 years ago

The Getty museum used to do that (and be very aggressive about anyone using the old images) until recently. They have since pulled their collective heads out of their collective asses and allowed public access and relatively free use. Other museums still do this kind of senseless protective stuff regularly.

rmc6• 12 years ago

It is debateable whether or not scanning a public domain book allows you to claim copyright on it. Alas.

Some of the early maps of Ireland (from 1840s) have been scanning and rectified and put online by the Ordenance Survey of Ireland. But they're all copyrighted by them, and you can't have them. (they're viewable here http://maps.osi.ie/ )

JetSpiegel• 12 years ago

If only the Vatican Bank was so transparent...

carlob3• 12 years ago

I highly doubt most of that stuff will be publicly accessible. A friend told she had a very hard time finding the documents she needed for her thesis at the Vatical Library. She had the definite impression, after a lengthy process to get clearance, that the inventory was kept patchy on purpose to make it hard for external visitors to find stuff in the allotted time.

protomyth2• 12 years ago

from the actual press release:

“All manuscipts digitised through this operation will be released on the Vatican Apostolic Library's website as high-definition data. As a result, numerous researchers in the fields of academia and in various fields of knowledge will be able to interpret the valuable manuscripts, to which access had long been restricted, in their original form”, declared the president of the NTT Data Corporation.

carlob3• 12 years ago

We might still both be right. Released through the website might still mean that you have to go through a process to get access. We only know you will not be required to fly to Rome anymore.

earksiinni6• 12 years ago

The interview process is short and straightforward, or at least it was in my case, but the indexing system is a nightmare and a patchwork of centuries of amateur and professional librarians cobbling together catalogs. Some of the collections can only be referenced using catalogs that are 250+ years old--literally. I don't mean copies or modern printings of the catalogs. I mean literally some dude wrote on the pages in front of you 250 years ago and that is the tool that you are supposed to use to find your sources. Yes, very low quality facsimiles are tucked away in a corner of the reading room, but you need to figure out which catalog they're in to find them...

One definitely wonders at some point whether the whole thing is organized as a conspiracy to confuse new Ph.D. students!

carlob3• 12 years ago

I think it also depends on what you're looking for. My friend was working on libertines in the XVII century, so probably documents the church is not especially proud of now.

It did not help that one of her advisors had published a paper on homosexual marriage in a roman church in the late XVI century [0, 1]

[0] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiesa_di_San_Giovanni_a_Porta...

[1] http://books.google.it/books?id=tOANjJswdRQC&pg=PA22&lpg=PA2...

UbuntuJon• 12 years ago

An attempt to stay relevant and continue to paralyse certain communities with superstitious bullshit from the iron age, for the foreseeable future!

Abraln• 12 years ago

I'm assuming you did not read the link, the library includes art from feudal japan, a book from the Aztec empire, etc. Did you think it was just a bunch of old bibles? Missionaries would report what they saw when they traveled the world (often making "first contact"). I don't think digitizing texts in Ancient Greek will help "relevance" much.

earksiinni6• 12 years ago

As a former history Ph.D. student who has done research in the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum (ASV), this is kind of an uninformed announcement, or at least it is not the whole truth. The truth is that the Vatican already has all of its pre-modern manuscripts (e.g., roughly pre-1700) digitized. In fact, you're not allowed to read the original copies of the older manuscripts. Instead, when you request a manuscript they hand you a CD that you then take down a flight of stairs to a room with iMac G4's that aren't connected to the Internet where you can view the jpeg's using some early 2000's image viewer. Anyone with a master's degree and with a legitimate claim to being a researcher can visit the archive after a brief interview, and the application process is perfectly straightforward and made public on the ASV's website in multiple language. There is nothing "secret" about it. (It is "secret" in the Latin sense of the word meaning "apart," because it was established as a central archive meant to replace the decentralized archives that were hitherto held in each of the Vatican's individual departments.)

They could have put the digital copies up a long, long time ago if they had felt like it, but libraries are institutions of power and old attitudes die hard. I don't know what the new digitized copies will add, but I'm guessing that they will be in color and that they will also include the more modern manuscripts in the collection. There are more important reforms that they could divert their resources to, however, like better and more uniform indexing and cataloging. Perhaps these will follow, but even once (if) they put the copies on the Internet the state of the Vatican catalogs is such that it will be extremely difficult for any interested members of the public to approach the source material.

frozenport• 12 years ago

Any ideas if they are hiding anything fun?

rmc6• 12 years ago

After the Da Vinci Code book & film, people think there's some sort of secret early Christian books that are being hidden and if the world knew about them, Christianity/Catholic church would fall.

But there are loads of early Christian books / "gospels" that survive or rediscovered which are quite different from what's in the bible, and no-one really cares.

For example in 1945, a pile of early books were discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt[1], including a Gospel of Thomas[2]. There is a Infancy Gospel of Thomas[3] from ~145CE which claims to talk about Jesus as a child, in which child Jesus uses his supernatural powers to kill children who bully him.

Have the revelations of all this "brought down the Catholic Chruch"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_thomas [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infancy_Gospel_of_Thomas

earksiinni6• 12 years ago

Not hiding. But definitely many, many fun things that I could spend all day telling you about =) Some things just silly (one of my colleagues found a sixteenth-century property document involving a certain "Castel Cazzonelculo" outside of Rome--Google Translate is your friend). Some things more...subversive...

vidarh• 12 years ago

ASV is entirely separate from the Vatican Apostolic Library. The former is the archives of the internal actions of the church; the latter is an archive of publications obtained by the Vatican.

earksiinni6• 12 years ago

Wow, facepalm. I wish I could downvote my own comment now. I swear, I thought that I read "Vatican Secret Archive" in the original article. Yes, the BAV (Vatican Library) is a separate entity, and I've also researched there. AFAIK, none of the BAV is digitized. Unlike the ASV, there isn't even a microfilm copy of the BAV (about 10% of the ASV's collections were photographed in the 50's and are available in St. Louis, MO). This is actually a monumental step =) Also unlike the ASV, the BAV actually has decent catalogs, meaning that people will be able to actually use the digital collection.

Fuxy2• 12 years ago

Now we really need a long term storage medium.

Has anybody else though about just how fragile data is these days I mean these books/manuscripts are ancient?

What is the likelihood of any of our data surviving for over 1000 years in the digital realm?

We need a long therm digital data archive or we risk loosing a lot of important but not very popular data since the internet favors popularity over importance.

ekianjo4• 12 years ago

Problem is, data storage evolves very fast and new technologies come and go. Even if you designed the ultimate, 1000-year durable floppy disk 20 years back, nobody would use it now because it's obsolete in terms of storage. You can only reach this kind of thinking when storage density reaches a plateau.

Personally, rather than data storage, i'm much more concerned about the formats and the OS we use for our files - will they still be supported 50-100 years down the road ? For the ones which are open-sourced, maybe, but how about all the proprietary formats ? How can we ensure they will remain readable ?

nodata• 12 years ago

You store the data in an open lossless format at the highest quality that makes sense, then transfer the digital copy from storage medium to storage medium as they are developed.

So for your example you'd transfer from floppy disk to bluray.

Cthulhu_2• 12 years ago

There's a few techniques out there or being developed for this kind of data - things like disks made out of sapphire that last 10 million years, which are used to store information about nuclear waste storage (http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/132793-the-10-million-yea...).

Vatican to Digitize 41 Million Pages of Ancient Manuscripts

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