If you thought the last Pope's Twitter bug was a sign of the times for the Vatican, just wait. The Vatican has announced that the entire Apostolic Library will be digitized.
Comprised of 900,000 documents, the Apostolic Library holds rare literary artifacts such as the Gutenberg Bible.
According to numbers referenced by The Verge, the library contains 40 million pages and will take nine years to fully digitize.
Once digitization takes its nearly decade-long course, it will make up 2.8 petabytes of information. The massive storage donation is being made by EMC, "a company that specializes in information security and data storage."
Details are yet to be revealed by EMC as to how it intends to deal with the various forms of media in the library or what formats will be employed for the information storage.
"[EMC] has assisted in similar digitization efforts in the past, including the creation of a 3D digital reconstruction of a Leonardo da Vinci work, which suggests that the company can handle preservation of both the text, images, and any ornamentation," The Verge says.
Considering the "historically (and religiously) important illuminations and marginalia" of the texts in the library, EMC has a tough road ahead in ensuring the digitization is as meticulous as possible. Hence the importance of the format(s) the company decides upon for storage.
"EMC will be using a format certified by the International Standards Organization, but even so, digital files can break down or become outdated and unreadable," The Verge says, explaining, too, that as the initial storage of the files will take approximately three years to complete, it is unclear at this time how the subsequent six years will be utilized.
Whatever the full nine years will be used for, it's incredible to consider the short length of time relative to the centuries it took to complete the library itself.
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