The Vatican’s Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana and Oxford University’s Bodleian Library have announced a 4 year project to convert some of their oldest documents into a digital format.
An estimated 1.5 million ancient pages will make the transition from their original forms to something that can be read on an iPad and the $3.17 million project is being made possible by the Polonsky Foundation, which is based in London.
Among the works that will be digitised are Greek manuscripts, bibles from the 15th century and the “Sifra”, the oldest Hebrew codex in the Vatican’s collection.
Lessons in Ancient Latin, Greek and Hebrew will still be required to make sense of the digital copies.