The Vatican Apostolic Library and the Japanese company NTT DATA have signed an agreement according to which the company will digitize all of the 82,000 manuscripts in the Library’s collection. (NTT DATA, a firm that specializes in this type of work, is currently fulfilling contracts in 40 countries.)
Msgr. Jean-Luis Bruguès, Archivist and Librarian of the Holy Roman Church, said that the spirit of the project is “to preserve and make available the immense treasure of humanity entrusted to the Library.” “In fact,” he continued at the press conference, “the Library wants to make available for consultation via the Internet manuscripts that 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.”
After the digitized manuscripts have been scanned and archived, they will be released on the Library’s web site as high-definition image data so as to give scholars and the general public easy access to the Vatican’s collection of valuable historical manuscripts.
The first stage of the project, which foresees the digitization of 3,000 of these texts, is expected to take four years.