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NTT DATA Corporation, a global IT services provider, has enabled the Vatican Apostolic Library, also known as ‘Popes Library’, to digitalise ancient manuscripts and make them available to people worldwide who can access these high-resolution digitally formatted ancient manuscripts on any digital media such as PC, mobile, tab, etc. In the first phase in October 2014, NTT DATA deployed a new application for accessing and browsing the Vatican Apostolic Library’s digital archive online, enabling people to view digital reproductions of more than 4,000 ancient manuscripts at the Library’s website.
This new Vatican Apostolic Library’s digital archiving system can also be accessed at the portal site maintained by Digita Vaticana, an affiliated foundation that raises funds to support the Library’s preservation projects.
The Vatican Apostolic Library has been working on for past few years to digitally archive all manuscripts preserved in the Library, amounting to some 82,000 specimens and 41 million pages. In March 2014, it roped in NTT DATA as its partner for this project based on its favourable evaluation of the company’s track record in digital archiving, as exemplified by its work at Japan’s National Diet Library, and its technological expertise and resources, including its digital archive service AMLADTM.
The initial collaboration between the Vatican Apostolic Library and NTT DATA covered about 3,000 documents over a four-year period till 2018. The project is considered to be of paramount importance for the preservation and dissemination of knowledge in the service of culture throughout the world.
Readers can now see high-definition images using a special viewer built with NTT DATA’s digital archive solution technology, AMLADTM. The viewer, which has interfaces for multiple types of devices, including tablets, provides easy access to brilliant images of these irreplaceable manuscripts.
The Japanese IT service major has also leveraged its AMLAD technology to establish the necessary infrastructure for long-term storage, safekeeping and viewing of digital specimens. Currently, NTT DATA is optimising its metadata management technology to develop an efficient search function for the Vatican Apostolic Library’s digital archive.
“We will continue to leverage our IT solution technologies to help advance research in diverse academic disciplines and satisfy people’s curiosity about these irreplaceable manuscripts,” informs Toshio Iwamoto, President and CEO of NTT DATA.
Vatican Apostolic Library contains a huge documentation of the humankind’s history and thinking, of arts and literature, of mathematics and science, of law and medicine, from the earliest centuries of the Christian era up to the present days, in many different languages and cultures from the Far East to the West of pre-Columbian America, as well as a humanistic background of extraordinary value.
In collaboration with NTT DATA, Vatican Apostolic Library aims to support the further improvement of the project of digital archiving of its manuscripts using NTT’s innovative technologies.
“In so doing, we will further nurture our mission of making these treasures of humankind more widely known, in a profound spirit of universality-in terms of both knowledge and collaboration with institutions and companies throughout the world,” explains Monsignor Cesare Pasini, Prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library.
