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The last episode of "60 Minutes" included a segment on the Vatican library, with its millions of unique and irreplaceable books. It's just too awful to contemplate the loss if the building were lost in some disaster.

Why isn't there a program to digitize all of it? Sure, it'll take decades, but every treasure digitized is one that won't be lost. It doesn't have to be imaged with the finest scanners available, even just a cheap digital camera is enough to record the information for posterity. And, it's the information that matters, not the physical books.




I'm not sure if they are working on it, but for example many Hebrew manuscripts in Vatican (http://www.scribd.com/doc/27128629/Hebrew-Manuscripts-in-the... ) became available as microfilms for the Institute of Microfilmed Hebrew Manuscripts (http://jnul.huji.ac.il/imhm/)

At least some part of them were going to be digitized (see http://web.nli.org.il/sites/NLI/English/library/news/Pages/d... ).




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