Internet and culture: The Vatican and the Bodleian Libraries posted digitized ancient manuscripts and printed books online

The Vatican and the Bodleian Libraries posted digitized ancient manuscripts and printed books online. The web site with digitized copies of the books was launched on December 3, 2013 with participation of the British Polonsky Foundation, supported different cultural and educational projects.  

In particular, the new resource stores a digitized copy of the so called 42-line Bible, printed by Johannes Gutenberg in 1455 and belonging to the Bodleian Library.  The copy, stored in the library, is among 50 books from the first edition, published in the printing office of Gutenberg.

Also the web site features digitized pages from the Jewish religious books of the XI-XVI centuries and religious texts in Latin and Greek, dated back IX-X centuries.

Currently, it is going out the work on digitization of other texts, stored in two ancient libraries. In the future, the web site will obtain a collection of Greek manuscripts of Vatican, which includes texts of Homer, Sophocles, Plato and Hippocrates. The Bodleian Library which collection is much larger that in Vatican, plans to digitize manuscripts and books dating from the XV to XVII centuries.

About the project on the digitization of old books and manuscripts, launched by the Bodleian and the Vatican Library, was announced in 2012. It is planned to put at the web site about 1.5 million pages. The project, which was conceived as a four-year, has contributed more than $ 3 million.

The Bodleian Library and the Polonsky Foundation have previously worked on a similar project. They have digitized and posted in the Internet about 280,000 fragments of the Cairo Genizah – a collection of medieval documents found in storage of Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo at the end of the XIX century.