Digital libraries: Vatican to digitize manuscripts

The Vatican is going to digitize the thousands of manuscripts in the Vatican Library, l'Osservatore Romano, the Holy See's daily, announced. The full digitisation project will take some ten years. Manuscripts will be digitized in order to provide easier access to them and safeguard and conserve the assets entrusted to the Vatican Library.

The Vatican Library has started digitising 23 manuscripts comprising 75,000 pages. The library staff are using "extremely advanced" technology, first developed by NASA, l'Osservatore Romano informed.

The Vatican Library, one of the oldest in the world, contains some 75,000 manuscripts comprising more than 40 million pages including the Codex Vaticanus Graecus (1209), the oldest known nearly complete manuscript of the Bible. Another choice item is the Secret History of Procopius, a vitriolic and scabrous account of the 6th-century Roman Emperor Justinian, discovered in the library and published in 1623.

The library, which was formally established in 1475 but is in fact much older, was separated from the Vatican Secret Archives at the beginning of the 17th century. The Secret Archives contain another 150,000 items including the full record of controversial WWII pope Pius XII whose publication is keenly awaited, as he moves towards sainthood, by experts divided over his alleged silence on the Holocaust.