Vatican Library Moving to Digital Document Management System

Vatican Library Moving to Digital Document Management System

The Vatican Apostolic Library, one of the world’s most important research libraries, has begun a pilot project to digitize thousands of its valuable historical manuscripts. All of its 82,000 manuscripts dating from the origin of the Church to the present are expected to be accessible online within the next four years.

The library is carrying out its document scanning and digital archiving project with the help of a Japanese technology group, NTT Data Corporation. The company provides outsourcing services to clients in over 40 countries and is experienced in digitizing rare manuscripts.

BBC reports that the initial stage of the project will cover about 3,000 handwritten documents over the next four years and that the Vatican Library’s long­term aim is to digitize 40 million pages of documents. By outsourcing its digitization project to this established company, the Vatican Library can expect to get this ambitious and prestigious project completed efficiently within the stipulated time frame.

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Benefits of the Digitization Drive The Vatican manuscript collections in Latin, Greek and Oriental are valuable treasures of mankind should be preserved at any cost. An efficient digital document management system would help in the following ways •

Preserve and archive the precious historical documents

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Provide academics and scholars with quicker and easier access to the records

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Create back up of the valuable material

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Reduce handling of fragile manuscripts

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Save storage space

Technology for Digitizing the Vatican Manuscripts Technicians from NTT will work together with Vatican librarians to digitize the entire collection of 82,000 manuscripts which comprises more than 41 million pages. The first stage of the project will cover the digitization of around 3,000 handwritten documents. NTT scanners will be used for document scanning and special software will be used to archive and manage the collection. NTT’s broad wavelength­range voltage­controlled laser beam scanners, ideal for handling fragile and brittle manuscripts, have no moving parts and are much faster and smaller than conventional scanners.

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In addition to document scanning services, the Vatican Library would need an efficient document management system covering indexing, document preparation, access control, keyword search, and proper archiving of information.

Document Conversion for Businesses Organizations, both private businesses and government, are converting their paper documents into digital format to improve efficiency, flexibility, and workflow. Most hire the services of a professional document conversion company to help with the project. Digital imaging services are available for everything from photographs, slides, negatives, microfilm and microfiche to books, journals, newspapers, maps, posters, catalog cards, reports and manuscripts. OCR / full­ text conversion services are also provided.

Outsourcing document management to a reliable firm can ensure lower operating costs, smoother operations, electronic review, document security, and easy sharing information with indexing capabilities. .

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