Let's Pope mass upgrade of Vatican Library data centre is blessed with some of that famed infallibility The Holy See has upgraded the data centre used to preserve the extensive collection of historic documents held in the Vatican Apostolic Library. It has dismantled the old bit barn and replaced it with a small, self-contained facility with new networking infrastructure and eight server cabinets in a hot containment system. "We …
Bit more than bibles there.. Quite a bit more, actually.
It's not generally realised, but a lot of the stuff we know about what happened in history (and isn't propaganda) does not come from a "historian" being present, or taking notes from survivors journalist-style. We know because of the godawful rows about who gets to pay the bills that got Religiously preserved by Accountancy and Legal.
And about half the library is that kind of "boring" stuff that will become accessible to researchers that know it's in there somewhere, but don't have the neccessary accreditation.
Not that it isn't a good idea to not let everyone paw fragile medieval documents, but this digitization project makes things a lot more accessible.
Remenber it stores what they had no time or will to destroy and burn.... when they didn't burn the authors directly.
Religions are often very effective at trying to destroy knowledge, and many books and libraries were destroyed in the name of some god - and those who think a single books is the only book you need to read, are the worst ones. We still see some religious madness about books today.
Sure, some books were preserved because regarded useful, or because stupid people read into them what wasn't written, or because some cleverer ones understood their value, and couldn't destroy them.
Anyway this the Library, not the Archives - it doesn't store Popes shopping lists.
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I'm hoping they use something like bitmaps or plain text to store their scanned data rather than some proprietary format. Like right now I am dealing with recovering some 10-year old scans of contracts that were scanned in some archaic format that the only bit of software that can read it runs only on Windows 95/98 and requires a special image processing card that doubled as the interface to the scanner.
For reference, I believe that the World would be better off if the Catholic Church just up and disappeared overnight, or at least their management and central organization. But they are holding on to some historical records that are quite important from when they went through their World Domination phase and stole everything that wasn't Catholic, and burnt everything they couldn't abscond with; making them the only people with any written information left in Europe / Western Asia.
Also, they are still holding on to a lot of files that are quite pertinent to on-going criminal investigations (Although I'm pretty sure those aren't going to be making it into their archives)
That's a different archive. The Vatican Archives, where documents about the operations of the Vatican are stored, is not the Library - although their physical locations are very close.
It is true many documents in the Vatican Archives are not available - they are run as state archives with the same level of secrecy - if not more, and being an absolute monarchy (the papacy is modeled after the Roman Emperor.... Caesar is often more appealing than God) there are no FOIA or the like....
Not just on-going investigations. They have a large number of documents that basically are "eyes only" and limited to a very select few if the stories and rumors are to be believed.
*THOSE* are usually kept in the brain of a 14-yr-old nun with eidetic memory...
But seriously, we all know the vatican would never deliberately exclude anything from digitization. It's just that info that might present Rome in an unflattering light will mysteriously find it self at tje bottom of the priority list. Thats all. #
Just follow the link...
"The implementation of DigiVatLib is based on open standards for metadata and APIs that allow the digital collections to be interoperable. We have adopted the International Image Interoperability Framework, or IIIF set of APIs making digital materials easily accessible and usable for scholars worldwide."
Can he (no nuns doing priests' jobs, there) excommunicate users from the Holy Domain?
You shall have no other domains before me
You shall not take the name of the Domain in vain
Observe the patches day, to keep it holy
Honor your hardware and your software
You shall not kill critical processes
Neither shall you commit adultery installing someone else's software
Neither shall you steal users' passwords and data
Neither shall you bear false witness against your neighbor ["who, me?"]
Neither shall you covet your neighbor's faster CPU, SSD and larger monitor.
You shall not desire anything that is your neighbor's local file system, external disks, and cloud storage
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