[fitsbits] The Vatican adopts FITS

[William Pence]

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.  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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