EMC Brings The Vatican Apostolic Library Into The Digital Age

ROME, March 7, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --



News S ummary:

• EMC will support the Vatican Apostolic Library in digitizing its catalogue of 80,000 historic manuscripts and 8,900 incunabula as part of EMC's Information Heritage Initiative.
• The project will completely digitize the library, resulting in 40 million pages preserved in digital reproductions.
• The first phase of the nine-year project will provision 2.8 petabytes of storage, utilizing a range of industry-leading solutions from EMC including Atmos ^®, Data Domain ^®, EMC Isilon ^®, NetWorker ^® and VNX ^®.

Full Story:

EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC) has today announced that it is providing 2.8 petabytes of storage to help the Vatican Apostolic Library digitize its entire catalogue of historic manuscripts and incunabula (a book or pamphlet printed before 1501). One of the oldest libraries in the world, the Vatican Apostolic Library holds many of the rarest and most valuable documents in existence including the 42 line Latin Bible of Gutenberg, the first book printed with movable type and dating between 1451 and 1455. EMC is supporting the Vatican Library's goal of preserving in an ISO-certifiable digital format delicate texts vulnerable to deterioration and decay from repeated handling, ensuring that the accumulated knowledge of generations is freely available for future study.

Additional manuscripts being digitized include:

• The Sifra, a Hebrew manuscript written between the end of the 9 ^th Century and the middle of the 10 ^th, one of the oldest extant Hebrew codes;
• Greek testimonies of the works of Homer, Sophocles, Plato and Hippocrates;
• The famous incunabulum of Pius II's De Europa, printed by Albrecht Kunne in Memmingen in around 1491;
• The Code-B, one of the oldest extant manuscripts of the Greek Bible, dated to the 4 ^th Century.

EMC's sponsorship forms part of its ' Information Heritage Initiative', which works to protect and preserve the world's information for future generations and make it globally accessible in digital form for research and education purposes. Working with its systems integrator partner Dedagroup, EMC will provide 2.8 petabytes of storage capacity – enough to store the 40 million pages of digitized manuscript – across its industry-leading EMC Isilon® scale-out NAS, EMC Atmos® object storage, EMC Data Domain ^® and EMC NetWorker ^® backup and recovery solutions and EMC VNX® unified storage solutions over the first phase of the nine-year project, which is expected to take three years.  

Past EMC Information Heritage initiatives include: supporting the JFK Library ( Boston, USA) in the process of digitizing and archiving its entire collection; creating a high-resolution, 3D digital reconstruction of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Codex of Flight'; supporting the Herzogin Anna Amalia Library (Weimar, Germany), home to a unique collection of Faust first editions; and sponsoring the Vatican's Lux in Arcana exhibition, which brought into the public domain for the first time in 400 years 100 original historical documents from the Vatican Secret Archive earlier in 2012.

The current digitization project brings together a number of organizations and institutional partners, including Oxford University's Bodleian Library, the Polonsky Foundation and the University of Heidelberg.

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