Vatican Library to digitize, make public 82,000 manuscripts

The Vatican Library is moving forward with plans to digitize 41 million pages of content to make it available to the public for the first time ever. The project will take several years and will result in the publication of some 82,000 manuscripts, some dating to the 5th century AD.

LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The Vatican Apostolic Library is one of the world's most legendary, yet most restricted libraries. It is accessible to scholars, but not the public because its collection of over 82,000 manuscripts contain rare and unique works that are literally priceless. They are also ancient, some manuscripts are over 1,600 years old.

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The Vatican Apostolic Library was founded in 1451 and has served for centuries as a center for religious scholarship. Yet, demand for access to the works inside has been great as scholars - and the public desire to see for themselves the exquisite works of art that form the library.

Those wishes will soon be granted. The Vatican has launched a 4-year project that will see these manuscripts digitized by a Japanese tech firm and published online. This will give the public access to manuscripts that before have only men mentioned by the few scholars that have studied them.

Many others simply haven't been seen in centuries.

The Vatican Apostolic Library is considered one of the finest libraries in the world, possibly rivaling the Great Library at Alexandria in terms of cultural significance.

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