The Vatican is digitizing thousands of its rarest texts - Geek

" ... The Vatican, which maintains one of the oldest, most comprehensive, and most well preserved collections of ancient texts in the world, is finally turning to technology ... The thing about any organization as old and large  as the Catholic Church is that, over time, it has an incredible reach and access. Yes, the Vatican archives contain rare manuscripts by important Christian figures, but they also have rare Chinese scrolls collected by early papal explorers, working documents confiscated from early scientists (but, endearingly, still preserved for the ages), and even ancient, illustrated versions of non-Christian holy texts.

Say what you like about the Vatican, it certainly has a tradition of respecting information for its own sake — at least, internally. Now, that belief in hoarding such culture for internal reference is colliding with the modern attitude toward data freedom — and this is the result ... Of course, while the Vatican employs some of the best antiquities workers alive, it’s not exactly well versed in cutting-edge technology. Leaving aside security, which is apparently quite modern, this isn’t a group known for its bleeding edge technical innovations. As such, it has turned to a digital file format developed at NASA for storing and viewing scientific documents. Called the FITS format, it allows very large files to be stored and, more importantly, supports large and complex metadata tags for making sense of the associated image. That’s important if you’re storing a big list of stellar light readings, as NASA might, but just as important for a manuscript written in a long-dead language ... You’ve been able to browse a small selection of amazing Vatican books for some time now, via the Vatican library website and its still-nascent Digitization Project, but that only provided a few hundred collections of static images. This initiative would not only see an additional 3,000 manuscripts digitized by 2018 (and another 75,000 or so over the next 15 years), but would do analysis of the pages to make them searchable. So-called optical character recognition looks at the exterior of each letter on the page and tries to figure out which letter it best resembles — a job that’s much, much harder with faded pages from stylized, ancient manuscripts. Believe it or not, there was no Helvetica during the founding of Vatican City ..."