The Vatican Library is going digital. Founded in 1451, the library is one of the oldest and most exclusive in the world. The non-profit organization Digita Vaticana Oculus is currently in the process of digitizing 80,000 manuscripts from the library's archives and making them available to the public online. This is only a fraction of the 180,000 manuscripts, 1.6 million books and 150,000 images the library holds, some of which date back thousands of years.
This project will help preserve these historical documents for years to come. Specialized machines carefully scan the manuscripts and the digital images are saved in multiple locations before being uploaded to the library's website. With 41 million pages to scan, the project is expected to take about 15 years to complete. But the first 500 manuscripts are available right now, which means there are already thousands of ancient texts and gorgeous illustrations to browse through. Included in the current collection are the bilingual version of Homer's The Iliad, illustrations of Dante's Divine Comedy by Botticelli, and fragments of the Koran Kufic.
It's incredible that these amazing documents that come from all over the world and cover such a large span of history will now be available for the public to view. And perhaps most importantly, they will be saved for future generations to see as well.
