Internet and culture: Vatican to publish 4000 ancient manuscripts in the Internet

The Vatican Apostle Library started digitizing the archive of 4000 ancient manuscripts – tells the British newspaper International Business Times.

The library, founded in the XV century by Pope Nicholas V, holds about 80,000 manuscripts, drawings, prints and incunabula created by people of different faiths in different periods of history. The archives contain records of the library and drawings of great artists and scientists, such as Michelangelo and Galileo, and important historical documents. To date, at the website of the library was published only a small part of the archive - a total of 500 manuscripts and 600 incunabula, but thanks to the program Digita Vaticana, which uses a special format digitization and storage FITS, by 2018 the number of digitized materials should grow to 4000. All of them will be presented at the website of the library for free and in high resolution, up to the end of the year here be also run a convenient search through the archive.

Currently, Vatican also collects funds for the digitization of 76 000 manuscripts – it would take more than 50 million Euros and more than 15 years.