How does the Vatican plan to make its documents digital?

It’s about time that the Vatican gets with the digitalizing program when it comes to its very precious and delicate documents.  With over a staggering 40 million pages straight from the archives to scan, this task requires 50 experts and five scanners. Rome was not built in a day. Even though we’re talking about Vatican City here, this procedure could literally take years to complete. The whole library may take around 109 years to make its way online.

Founded in 1451, the Vatican Library contains around 82,000 manuscripts, with some that are 1,800 years old. The Library will work closely with the Japanese IT firm NTT Data in order to start the process of scanning the first load of 3,000 manuscripts. So far, the completion guesstimate for every 3,000 manuscripts is around four years. It is anticipated that some of these documents will be ready for online/digital viewing at the end of this year.

There are many protocols to be followed before the scanning commences. The scanners have to be ever so careful as to not destroy the documents. The special scanners have been tested over the past year, and contain a screen to protect the documents from any severe light. Curtains will be strategically placed over the windows in the room where the scanning will occur.

When handling the delicate documents, workers will wear gloves and not wear any garb that could potentially damage the documents. All workers will be closely watched by Vatican supervisors.

Once the documents are scanned, they will be organized in order to suit long-term storage and uploaded onto the Vatican Library’s website. Anyone can access the documents once they’re uploaded. The library’s data is anticipated to take up around 43 quadrillion bytes of storage space. All files will be backed up just in case anything gets erased.

The speculated cost lies around $25 million. NNT Data will pay this cost, and is accepting donations online to help this cause. Test scans have been performed. The workers will embark on their scanning undertakings very soon.

Story via WSJ