I hope they get a vote at the papal conclave out of this.
Holy crap! EMC gives Vatican Library 2.8PB to store manuscripts
The Vatican Library is losing its walls. Its 89,000 historic manuscripts are being made available online for access by scholars world-wide courtesy of EMC. The library, properly known as the Vatican Apostolic Library, is located in the Vatican City and is one of the oldest libraries in the world, established formally in 1475 …
-
Thursday 7th March 2013 16:33 GMT Rippy
Beautiful language!
"Dematerialisation" is an exquisite choice to describe freeing the Word from the crass bonds of the physical world so it can range freely in the aether!
> Digitisation might be a better translation of the Italian word that gave rise to dematerialisation.
How very British to prefer to speak of "giving it the finger".
G.
-
Thursday 7th March 2013 16:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Storage for long term conservation?
"The Amos storage will be used for long term conservation with the Isilon arrays used for items needing fast access. Documents will be stored in an ISO-certifiable digital format to ensure, EMC says, future availability."
For personal use, I was wondering what is the lifetime storage on writable CD/DVDs?
-
Thursday 7th March 2013 16:55 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Storage for long term conservation?
@dgharmon - I wouldn't expect to get any more than five years out of a modern writeable CD/DVD and that's if you've got good ones. There is a reason you get them for 25p or so.
Of course, you may get lucky, I've got some CDs from over ten years ago which are fine, but I've got some DVDs from a year or two ago, which are knackered.
Never put data you actually want to keep on a CD/DVD, unless you are very disciplined about copying them every year or so.
I work in data protection and currently when friends ask me what they should do for backup/atchive, I say: For small amounts of data, for home use, I'd suggest a good memory stick, with one off-site. For larger amounts I'd suggest something like a Western Digital external USB drive, to be kept offsite, with a duplicate disk onsite. Only use DVDs as a very last resort and not even then really, because people intend to copy them to new media, but never do.
-
-
Thursday 7th March 2013 17:40 GMT Anonymous Coward
150MB per page!?
@Jeff: Yes, 150MB per page. High resolution digital photographs of each page, because these are hand-written manuscripts where you may not always be sure that's an "e" and not an "G" (well, substitute whatever characters from the Greek/Latin/Hebrew/???? that you see fit). So you scan the page at as high a res as you can and store that.
-
-
Thursday 7th March 2013 21:42 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: 150MB per page!?
Look at it like this: Assume 24 bit color. That's 50MPixel. Call it 7000x7000 pixels. At 1200 dpi (a good modern scanner) that's only about 6 by 6 inches. Considering old manuscripts were much larger than that, and 150MB/page, even with lossless compression, doesn't sound like so much.
-
Thursday 7th March 2013 19:37 GMT Robert Helpmann??
Re: 150MB per page!?
It is also possible that the resolution involved might not require 150MB/page. The space requirements might be generated by multiple pics of the same page at different resolutions, cataloging or other needs.
By the way, in terms of this type of collection (if I understand correctly), when a piece is labelled "manuscript" that indicates it is written by hand. You don't need to indicate both.
-
-
-
-
-
Friday 8th March 2013 04:16 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: Stooring something digitally
There was a Nasa study on how you would store digitized glass photographic plates where you need the data to be available in a few hundred years - we use 100 year old plates to measure star movement.
The best two options they came up with was to print the data back to photographic glass plates - as a bit pattern which seemed a bit redundant. Or to print it onto silver nitrate black-white cinefilem
-
Friday 8th March 2013 12:45 GMT Tom 38
Re: Stooring something digitally
If you want something to last a thousand years, probably best to carve it in huge letters on a chunk of hard rock and stick it somewhere it's unlikely to degrade. Best to make the rock absolutely massive, 500-1500 tonnes or so, and also some sort of religious icon so people don't nick it to build stuff.
-
-
This post has been deleted by its author
-
-
-
Thursday 7th March 2013 22:10 GMT dssf
What letter is that, Father John?
"It looks like 'Our Father, who aren't in Heaven...' to me"
"Is that an 'o' or a 'u'?"...
"It looks like 'Blessed is he who...' "WHAT, in the NAME of the LORD"?
Oh, such blasphemers... They've stained our archives....
Look here, "Hell, Mary IS full of grace...."
"Glory be to the Father, the Sun, and the WHOLE 'V' Spirit..."
"No, I don't WANT Anna's Bliss. Tell the Visitors to LEAVE the EARTH in GOD'S hands...."
-
-
Friday 8th March 2013 08:15 GMT Darkwolf
Re: No Google?
Google will wait until they are digitized, letting the Vatican eat the costs.
Then, as the Vatican will probably hook in alll the Google googliness so that it will show in Google search engine, Google will eventually slurp off all fhe data into their servers, and Google will put it back together and eventually monitize.
-
-
-
Friday 8th March 2013 12:49 GMT Tom 38
Re: The Gnostic Gospels
I think all stuff like that is kept in the Vatican Secret Archive, which I don't think they will digitize. Everything in the Library is available for anyone to read, but stuff in the Secret Archive is only available to accredited researches, and even then only after 75 years after the death of the Pope under whom the material entered the Archive.
-