“The Vatican Library plans to digtize 80,000 manuscripts and store them in the open data format FITS, originally developed for astronomy and maintained under the IAU. The result is expected to be 40 million pages and 45 petabytes. FITS was chosen because it ‘has been used for more than 40 years for the conservation of data concerning spatial missions and, in the past decade, in astrophysics and nuclear medicine. It permits the conservation of images with neither technical nor financial problems in the future, since it is systematically updated by the international scientific community.'” [Source]
Yes the Vatican Secret Archives (yes it is still called that) will be using an open data format. Pretty cool as more and more documents are getting digitized and the archive to be accessible to anybody. Gee you would think that they would be guarding the archive with albino monk assassins with degrees in cryptography to encrypt everything with 512 bit encryption. Well you would think that if you bought the media’s line about the archives in the past.
5 comments
“albino monk assassins with degrees in cryptography…”
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaah! That was funny, Jeff.
Ah, but who else but an albino monk will be on guard against conspiracy-bent scholastic nuts-er, I mean professors? It’s not fair to stick Great Cthulhu with all the introverted hero wannabes.
And since nobody will download or open these documents at gigabyte-per-page resolution, they’ll STILL be secret! Heh heh heh!
Well, Dan Brown nuts are bad, but the most damage done to the Archives/Library recently was that twit of an Ohio State art professor, who kept stealing art for his own enjoyment over the course of decades.
And they wonder why archives people number and describe the pieces of paper inside folders, and try to keep a hairy eye on researchers….
Pretty cool. The Vatican uses a digital file and exchange format used by astronomers. Does that suggest a common link? Like, say, Vatican documents are “out of this world?”