Japanese company to digitalise Vatican manuscripts

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Wednesday, 26th March 2014
In Business In Japan,

Japanese company to digitalise Vatican manuscripts

The Vatican Apostolic Library, considered one of the most valuable repositories of data on the planet, is to be digitised in order to make some of the Catholic Church's most valuable historic documents available online.

As announced on Thursday (March 20th), the Japanese company NTT Data will undergo the massive task, which will ultimately result in making 82,000 manuscripts, totalling 41 million pages, accessible over the internet.

President of the firm Toshio Iwamoto attended a Vatican bank conference, during which he announced just 3,000 of the manuscripts have been included in this initial contract, with 1.5 million pages to be placed online by 2018.

NTT will reportedly dedicate its state of the art scanning equipment and enormous human resources to the project, to ensure it is completed on schedule and to the highest of standards.

The contract between the company and the Vatican is said to be worth 18 million euros.

Written by Graham McPherson