Vatican Library and Japanese Firm NTT DATA Sign Accord for Digital Archiving Project

From Vatican Radio:

The Vatican Apostolic Library and the Japanese firm NTT DATA on Thursday signed an agreement that will result in the rapid digitalization of 3,000 valuable historical manuscripts over the next four years. It’s the first step in the planned digitalization of all the 82,000 manuscripts preserved in the Library.

From NTT Data:

The overall project, which was started by the Vatican Apostolic Library some years ago and is currently ongoing with an initial output of 6,000 manuscripts, is intended to digitally archive all manuscripts preserved in the Library, amounting to some 82,000 specimens and 41 million pages.

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The initial collaboration between the Vatican Apostolic Library and NTT DATA, worth approximately EUR 18 million (USD 22.6 million or JYP 2.3 billion), will cover about 3,000 documents over a four-year period.

From Reuters

“The manuscripts that will be digitized extend from pre-Columbian America to China and Japan in the Far East, passing through all the languages and cultures that have marked the culture of Europe,” said Monsignor Jean-Louis Brugues, archivist and librarian of the Holy Roman Church.

See Also: Digitization Projects: Bodleian and the Vatican Libraries Publish Ancient Texts Online (December 3, 2013)

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See Also: EMC Providing Vatican Apostolic Library With 2.8 Petabytes of Storage to Digitally Preserve Entire Catalogue of Historic Manuscripts and Incunabula (March 7, 2013)

See Also:  Vatican’s Library begins to Digitize 80,000 of Its Manuscripts With NASA Technology (Video) (December 10, 2011)