The Vatican Apostolic Library has teamed up with the European Space
Agency (ESA) to digitize its treasures using space technology.
The Library’s ancient collection is being digitized
in an attempt to ensure that future generations will have access to the
books.
The organizations have been working for five years to digitize
the collection using the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) data
format.
The format, which was born out of radio astronomy and
adopted by the ESA, NASA, and scientific institutions, is described as
ideal for long-term data storage.
Earlier this month the Vatican Apostolic Library and
the ESA agreed to extend their partnership on archived information.
“Our
collaboration is based on the common intention by our two institutions
to promote the long-term preservation of images in electronic format,”
said Monsignor Cesare Pasini, Prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library,
in a statement.
Pasini also noted how the recent earthquakes in Italy have highlighted the importance of preserving valuable information.
Founded in 1475, the Vatican Library is one of the
world’s oldest libraries. Some of its manuscripts and codices are 1,800
years old, pre-dating the printing press.
The FITS digitization can also help preserve the
original documents, according to Vatican and ESA officials.
Pressing the
documents against a pane of glass for scanning can distort the old
pages, so specialist scanning software has been developed to
automatically calculate the document’s different angles, resulting in an
accurate, flat image.
The format’s instructions for reading and processing
data are in a text header tacked on top of the data. This means that, in
a century, when computers will likely be very different, all the
information to decode the data will be present within the same files.
The ESA told FoxNews.com that about 10,200
manuscripts have been digitized in the FITS format, equaling about 5
Petabytes of stored data.
The project’s long-term goal is to convert
about 82,000 manuscripts for a total data volume of about 50 Petabytes.
By way of comparison, 1 Petabyte is equal to about 223,000 DVDs.
The space agency is also looking to use FITS to
ensure that old and new satellite data is widely available.
“FITS can be
the solution to transform this challenge into an opportunity,”
explained ESA’s Long Term Preservation Programme Manager Mirko Albani,
in an email to FoxNews.com.