A combination of stellar images and the Vatican Library may seem odd but a digital technology developed by ESA and NASA to record, transmit and manipulate images in science is now being used to save ancient books.
In the ’70s, ESA and NASA developed the FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) format, designed specifically for storing scientific data that may go beyond images to have a lot of flexibility in the registration of various data from different types of instruments. This format is in fact used in various fields ranging from astronomy to nuclear medicine.
The FITS format is open source so it’s a real standard not tied to any business that can change it on a whim or for commercial reasons. It’s become a standard in the world of astronom, and today there are multi-platform programs such as SAOImage DS9 (image ©Gürkan Sengün) made to manipulate files in that format.
The most important image manipulation programs can read simple files in FITS format but they may have problems with more complex ones. However, this format is supported in a large number of programming languages, especially those used in scientific work.
The Vatican Library contains about eighty thousand manuscripts, some of which are really ancient. The most fragile of them are closed in a bunker in which the conditions of temperature and humidity are kept constant. It’s obvious that the access to the books must be strictly regulated to prevent their degrade but this limits the possibility for scholars to examine them.
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In the ’90s in the Vatican they already planned the digitization of the manuscripts but the project was never implemented. This year it was decided to begin a new project of digitization and the FITS format was chosen because it’s an open standard which also gives guarantees of longevity.
Since last spring a group of 23 manuscripts have been used for the first scanning test allowing to determine the most suitable ways to perform the necessary operations. The operations on the entire Vatican Library will go on for at least ten years and it’s estimated that the final amount of data will be around 45 petabytes of very high quality images.
Already the next year the first pictures could be put online and then more will be added over time, when they become available. This will make it possible to restrict more and more physical access to the manuscripts and at the same time to provide unlimited access to their images.
In the future, other proprietary formats can change or even disappear but the FITS format is also designed to be a durable standard. The work done in the Vatican Library will therefore be available in a century without any compatibility problems, possibly to be read by a computer that will display the images in the form of holograms.
