ТЕМ КОМУ ИНТЕРЕСНО.

Vatican Library Puts 4,000 Ancient Manuscripts Available Online For Free

8

The Vatican Apostolic Library is now digitising its valuable ancient religious manuscripts and putting them online via its website, available for the public to view for free, as well as turning to crowdfunding to help it complete its work.

The Vatican Library was founded in 1451 AD and holds over 80,000 manuscripts, prints, drawings, plates and incunabula (books printed prior to 1500 AD) written throughout history by people of different faiths from across the world.

The ancient documents are now being preserved under the DigitaVaticana programme using FITS, the format developed by Nasa to store images, astronomical, and astrophysical data, and until now, only 500 manuscripts and 600 incunabula were available to view on the Vatican Library website.
The manuscripts will be available as high-definition images that can be accessed using NTT Data’s AMLAD digital archive viewing technology (you can view some samples here), which can be used on a multitude of devices including tablets.
Right now, users have to search the old digitised database manually by clicking on each title and scanning through all the pages in each book, but the AMLAD viewer will have a comprehensive search function built-in and ready to use by the end of 2014.

The Vatican is also still seeking funds to digitise the remaining 76,000 manuscripts, which it estimates will take more than 15 years, over €50m, and the efforts of more than 150 specialised experts.
(Из ихних СМИ)