Vatican Library to make digital documents available online

[Sharur]

Meant to post something on this last month, but forgot. The following notes are extracted from the BBC News page on the story:

The Vatican Library has begun digitising its priceless collection of ancient manuscripts dating from the origins of the Church.

The first stage of the project will cover some 3,000 handwritten documents over the next four years.

The cost - more than $20m (£12m) - will be borne by Japan's NTT Data technology company.

Eventually, the library says it hopes to make available online all its 82,000 manuscripts.

"The manuscripts that will be digitised extend from pre-Columbian America to China and Japan in the Far East, passing through all the languages and cultures that have marked the culture of Europe," said Vatican's librarian Monsignor Jean-Louis Brugues.

The 3,000 documents to be scanned digitally over the next four years include copies of works of classical Greek and Latin literature and mediaeval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts.

The library, founded by a 15th Century Pope, also contains important works of mathematics and science, law and medicine from earliest times up to the present day.

The long-term aim is to digitise 40m pages of documents

This Reuters news item has a little more, plus additional images.

There's also a Daily Telegraph online page with similar details and comments enough to clearly demonstrate what happens when you let everyone in...

[Patrick Waterson]

A worthy aim, though a great pity they could not simply transcribe the historical documents as per the Perseus Project.

[Sharur]

To an extent, perhaps so, Patrick. But this way, you also get all the illustrations too, and aren't stuck with (often) just one transcription and translation (which may or may not be accurate to the original manuscript). Perseus is fine up to a point, and for what it covers, but I still keep going back the Loeb Classical Library texts, as I find it frustrating to have to hop between original and translated versions on different windows, while trying to remember where I was (and sometimes what it was I was trying to find...).