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Vatican to Digitize 41 Million Pages of Ancient Manuscripts
- stefantalpalaru 13y agoFrom the original press release[1]: > The project consists of an initial four-year phase during which three thousand manuscripts will be digitised, which may be extended into a second phase to include the 82,000 volumes – more than 40 million pages – of manuscripts preserved in the Library and dating from between the second and twentieth centuries. It's going to be slow but it's a step in the right direction. [1]: http://www.news.va/en/news/agreement-to-digitise-82000-manuscripts-in-the-vat http://www.news.va/en/news/agreement-to-digitise-82000-manus...
- quanticle 13y agoSlowness isn't surprising. These books are old and one-of-a-kind. Even with the best technology, it's still a very delicate process to scan them without damaging them. Some of these works are so old, that even the wrong kind of light will hurt them.
- Mikeb85 13y agoNo matter what your feelings are about religion, this is a great thing for humanity in general. The preservation of ancient manuscripts only makes us richer.
- duaneb 13y agoIt's sad you have to qualify it—religion is part of all our past, whatever our opinions of it now, and it will only increase our wisdom to understand our ancestors.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- johansch 13y agoThere's also that 1000 years of lost progress in science due to their persecution of scientists...
- johansch 13y agoToo many christian apologists around?
- ivanca 13y agoSomething changed at some point in Hacker News; or maybe christians are getting together (twitter?) to downvote contrarian opinions.
- ChrisNorstrom 13y agoNo, HN has extremely good vote ring detectors. Blaming religion for the flaws of humanity got really old about 5 years ago. It reached its peak at Reddit but it's no longer popular. Turns out people realized that blaming an object (gun), a religion (islam, christianity), a movement (athiesm, feminism), or a philosophy (conservative, liberal) is dismissive of humanity's flaws. When you get rid of religion, extremists do not go away, people find something else to be extreme about.
- ivanca 13y agoWe are not blaming the flaws of humanity, just its own flaws, but that is enough to get downvoted. So maybe maybe the vote ring is incidental or not, is still one.
- ChrisNorstrom 13y agoI think you got downvoted because you implied the community is protecting something you don't agree with, therefore there must be something wrong with the community. (I didn't think it deserved downvotes at all, it was just a question) It was silly for OP to pick on the Catholic church when all throughout history, from World War 1 and 2, to the African Genocides, and the inter European wars, and the Mongolian & Muslim invasions, and the European colonizations, and the Japanese massacres, and the Chinese wars and communist caused famines.... Hundreds of millions have died needlessly. We should look past it and be glad we as humans have evolved past those points. Human beings take advantage of large groups, infiltrate them and use them as their personal armies. Sometimes to do good, sometimes to do bad. The OP got downvoted into unreadable "grey hell" for a broad comment that brought nothing thought provoking.
- nsxwolf 13y agoIt's also very much a part of our present, perhaps Silicon Valley not withstanding.
- ekianjo 13y agoOh, don't worry, Silicon Valley still has some forms of religion. Like the idea of Singularity, with Kurzweil as a prophet. You also have Saint-like figures such as Steve Jobs, whose achievements are God-like for all his believers, no matter how he mistreated employees, competitors and humans in general. It's a strange thing, actually, to see people reject older nonsensical beliefs while creating their owns devoid of all rationality.
- tokipin 13y agopersonally i hope it highlights how arbitrary all the writings are.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pjungwir 13y agoI got to spend a few days once visiting St. Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai, one of the oldest monasteries in the world, which is famous for having never been sacked. The Codex Sinaiticus was found there, one of the two oldest complete manuscripts of the Bible. It also has some of the only surviving iconography in the world from before the iconoclast period. Their librarian is American from Boston, and he has been digitizing their library for several years now. My traveling companion was also a Boston librarian, and we had an amazing tour of the library. It was very strange to see, surrounded by ancient stone walls and crumbling manuscripts, top-of-the-line Macs, shelves of USB drives, and a giant digital camera in a room-size metal frame, with a cradle for resting books on. I'm delighted to hear more such works are being preserved!
- bane 13y agoThere's something strangely appropriate about old books and works of art and high-tech in the same space. It feels like you're present in a continuous stream of thought from ancient to present.
- dhughes 13y agoI find it amazing that the books and manuscripts are still around hundreds if not a thousand years later meanwhile the dye medium of my data CDs from the mid 90s is probably rotten.
- colechristensen 13y agoRotten old books can be salvaged using advanced techniques, maybe old data CDs can be too.
- adventured 13y agoPrompted a thought: bits are always either there or not, ultimately, correct? (meaning you can either recover it, or never can) Whereas with printed or written text, you can recover partial data - a partial single letter for example - and conclude what it was. With the potential of written text also being generally far more restricted in possibilities (given you know, eg the language and time frame), than what's on a data disc.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- protomyth 13y agoThe announcement http://www.news.va/en/news/agreement-to-digitise-82000-manuscripts-in-the-vat http://www.news.va/en/news/agreement-to-digitise-82000-manus...
- jonah 13y agoThey already have some things from their catalog digitized. e.g. http://www.mss.vatlib.it/guii/scan/link.jsp http://www.mss.vatlib.it/guii/scan/link.jsp http://www.vaticanlibrary.va/home.php?pag=cataloghi_online http://www.vaticanlibrary.va/home.php?pag=cataloghi_online
- ryannevius 13y agoAwesome! Do you have any idea what licensing / re-use / fair use of this content is? For example, would I be able to take these scans and build a digital product (e.g. web / desktop app) around them? Could I print one out and put it on a t-shirt? Etc. Something tells me "definitely not"...but I wasn't able to find anything conclusive on the site.
- jonah 13y agoThey site footer has a copyright notice. I'd say contact them - they may be open for non-commercial use.
- earksiinni 13y agoYou can get copies from the Archives for research purposes but it isn't cheap. I forget how much it cost when I was last there doing research. Also, they probably wouldn't grant permission for the purpose of making t-shirts, just my guess...=)
- kimmel 13y agoThey are watermarking scans of items that are not in copyright since they predate the copyright system. What kind of bullshit is this? These should all be public domain. Is there anyone besides Google and the Vatican that watermark public domain works?
- rmc 13y agoIt is debateable whether or not scanning a public domain book allows you to claim copyright on it. Alas. Some of the early maps of Ireland (from 1840s) have been scanning and rectified and put online by the Ordenance Survey of Ireland. But they're all copyrighted by them, and you can't have them. (they're viewable here http://maps.osi.ie/ http://maps.osi.ie/ )
- JetSpiegel 13y agoIf only the Vatican Bank was so transparent...
- carlob 13y agoI highly doubt most of that stuff will be publicly accessible. A friend told she had a very hard time finding the documents she needed for her thesis at the Vatical Library. She had the definite impression, after a lengthy process to get clearance, that the inventory was kept patchy on purpose to make it hard for external visitors to find stuff in the allotted time.
- protomyth 13y agofrom the actual press release: “All manuscipts digitised through this operation will be released on the Vatican Apostolic Library's website as high-definition data. As a result, numerous researchers in the fields of academia and in various fields of knowledge will be able to interpret the valuable manuscripts, to which access had long been restricted, in their original form”, declared the president of the NTT Data Corporation.
- carlob 13y agoWe might still both be right. Released through the website might still mean that you have to go through a process to get access. We only know you will not be required to fly to Rome anymore.
- prawks 13y agoIt also says nothing about how they are organized or indexed, which is very important given the volume of work present.
- earksiinni 13y agoThe interview process is short and straightforward, or at least it was in my case, but the indexing system is a nightmare and a patchwork of centuries of amateur and professional librarians cobbling together catalogs. Some of the collections can only be referenced using catalogs that are 250+ years old--literally. I don't mean copies or modern printings of the catalogs. I mean literally some dude wrote on the pages in front of you 250 years ago and that is the tool that you are supposed to use to find your sources. Yes, very low quality facsimiles are tucked away in a corner of the reading room, but you need to figure out which catalog they're in to find them... One definitely wonders at some point whether the whole thing is organized as a conspiracy to confuse new Ph.D. students!
- UbuntuJon 13y agoAn attempt to stay relevant and continue to paralyse certain communities with superstitious bullshit from the iron age, for the foreseeable future!
- Abraln 13y agoI'm assuming you did not read the link, the library includes art from feudal japan, a book from the Aztec empire, etc. Did you think it was just a bunch of old bibles? Missionaries would report what they saw when they traveled the world (often making "first contact"). I don't think digitizing texts in Ancient Greek will help "relevance" much.
- earksiinni 13y agoAs a former history Ph.D. student who has done research in the Archivum Secretum Apostolicum Vaticanum (ASV), this is kind of an uninformed announcement, or at least it is not the whole truth. The truth is that the Vatican already has all of its pre-modern manuscripts (e.g., roughly pre-1700) digitized. In fact, you're not allowed to read the original copies of the older manuscripts. Instead, when you request a manuscript they hand you a CD that you then take down a flight of stairs to a room with iMac G4's that aren't connected to the Internet where you can view the jpeg's using some early 2000's image viewer. Anyone with a master's degree and with a legitimate claim to being a researcher can visit the archive after a brief interview, and the application process is perfectly straightforward and made public on the ASV's website in multiple language. There is nothing "secret" about it. (It is "secret" in the Latin sense of the word meaning "apart," because it was established as a central archive meant to replace the decentralized archives that were hitherto held in each of the Vatican's individual departments.) They could have put the digital copies up a long, long time ago if they had felt like it, but libraries are institutions of power and old attitudes die hard. I don't know what the new digitized copies will add, but I'm guessing that they will be in color and that they will also include the more modern manuscripts in the collection. There are more important reforms that they could divert their resources to, however, like better and more uniform indexing and cataloging. Perhaps these will follow, but even once (if) they put the copies on the Internet the state of the Vatican catalogs is such that it will be extremely difficult for any interested members of the public to approach the source material.
- frozenport 13y agoAny ideas if they are hiding anything fun?
- rmc 13y agoAfter the Da Vinci Code book & film, people think there's some sort of secret early Christian books that are being hidden and if the world knew about them, Christianity/Catholic church would fall. But there are loads of early Christian books / "gospels" that survive or rediscovered which are quite different from what's in the bible, and no-one really cares. For example in 1945, a pile of early books were discovered in Nag Hammadi, Egypt[1], including a Gospel of Thomas[2]. There is a Infancy Gospel of Thomas[3] from ~145CE which claims to talk about Jesus as a child, in which child Jesus uses his supernatural powers to kill children who bully him. Have the revelations of all this "brought down the Catholic Chruch"? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_thomas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_thomas [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infancy_Gospel_of_Thomas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infancy_Gospel_of_Thomas
- Fuxy 13y agoNow we really need a long term storage medium. Has anybody else though about just how fragile data is these days I mean these books/manuscripts are ancient? What is the likelihood of any of our data surviving for over 1000 years in the digital realm? We need a long therm digital data archive or we risk loosing a lot of important but not very popular data since the internet favors popularity over importance.
- ekianjo 13y agoProblem is, data storage evolves very fast and new technologies come and go. Even if you designed the ultimate, 1000-year durable floppy disk 20 years back, nobody would use it now because it's obsolete in terms of storage. You can only reach this kind of thinking when storage density reaches a plateau. Personally, rather than data storage, i'm much more concerned about the formats and the OS we use for our files - will they still be supported 50-100 years down the road ? For the ones which are open-sourced, maybe, but how about all the proprietary formats ? How can we ensure they will remain readable ?
- nodata 13y agoYou store the data in an open lossless format at the highest quality that makes sense, then transfer the digital copy from storage medium to storage medium as they are developed. So for your example you'd transfer from floppy disk to bluray.
- Fuxy 13y agoRegular storage mediums are just too fragile and if you have a lot of data transferring it over takes too long we're still digitizing books. Long term storage medium capacity doesn't need to progress in line with regular storage mediums it just need to be updated once it's too out of sync. The old data can stay on the old version since there's no urgency in transferring it over as long as the spec for it is kept on the latest medium a reader can always be built to read it. We tend to worry about not having devices to read it but given how 3D printers are progressing having the spec and building a replacement reader should be easy enough.