[fitsbits] The Vatican adopts FITS
William Pence
to create a digital archive of manuscripts in the Vatican Library in
FITS format. It's a 10 year project that will eventually contain 40
million manuscript pages and will total 45 petabytes in size.
A couple blog entries are here:
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/archives.html
http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2010/03/80000-vatican-mss-to-be-digitized.html
And an Italian newspaper article is here:
http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2010/04/20/news/biblioteca_vaticana-3489668/
(babel fish gives a fairly coherent translation to English)
They chose to use the FITS format over alternatives like tiff, pdf or
Jpg 2000 because it is a simple, free, open-source, well-documented
archival format that should survive technical evolutions and still be
readable well into the future.
Bill Pence
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> Here is an interesting announcement from the Vatican about their plans
> to create a digital archive of manuscripts in the Vatican Library in
> FITS format.
There is also a semi-official statement in English in the Newsletter of
the Vatican Library
http://www.vaticanlibrary.va/home.php?pag=newsletter_art_00087
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Rob Seaman
The Vatican Newsletter mentions a "technical feasibility study". Does
anybody have a copy of this study? Were any of our august members
involved in the evaluation? Do we know how they are planning to
handle color? Or compression?
Yipes! A successful project with the Vatican archives is likely to
influence other such projects worldwide. The FITS community is poised
to become very much larger in scope.
Rob
--
> Here is an interesting announcement from the Vatican about their plans
> to create a digital archive of manuscripts in the Vatican Library in
Arnold Rots
discussion on multicolor encodings from a few years ago. It would seem
like an absolute must if one is serious about digitizing manuscripts.
Yes, this is huge if they decide to proceed!
I passed it on to our colleagues at Smithsonian Archives...
As to compression, I assume that the only type acceptable would be
loss-less compression.
Cheers,
- Arnold
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Giuseppe Vacanti
On 04/30/2010 11:47 AM, Thierry Forveille wrote:
> Rob Seaman a �crit :
>> Lots of interesting issues here:
>>
> Should the FITS working group perhaps try to establish a contact and
> offer our (limited) help??
On this point I should like to notice that the article in Italian
reports that IBM and the Vatican plan to submit the FITS standard to ISO
in order to make it an official image preservation and dissemination
standard. This seems to me a process the FITS community will want to get
involved in (if the report is correct).
Regards,
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Tel: +31-71-5284962 PGP: 0x7650713E