EMC Provides 2.8PB for Vatican Apostolic Library Digitalizing

EMC
Corporation is providing 2.8PB of storage to help the
Vatican
Apostolic Library digitize its entire catalog of historic manuscripts and
incunabula (a book or pamphlet printed before 1501).

One of the oldest libraries in the world,
the Vatican Apostolic Library holds many of the rarest and most valuable
documents in existence including the 42 line Latin Bible of Gutenberg, the
first book printed with movable type and dating between 1451 and 1455. EMC is
supporting the Vatican Library’s goal of preserving in an ISO-certifiable
digital format delicate texts vulnerable to deterioration and decay from
repeated handling, ensuring that the accumulated knowledge of generations is
freely available for future study.

Additional
manuscripts being digitized include:

• The Sifra, a Hebrew manuscript written
  between the end of the 9th Century and the middle of the 10th, one of the
  oldest extant Hebrew codes;

• Greek testimonies of the works of Homer,
  Sophocles, Plato and Hippocrates;

• The famous incunabulum of Pius II’s De
  Europa, printed by Albrecht Kunne in Memmingen in around 1491;

• The Code-B, one of the oldest extant
  manuscripts of the Greek Bible, dated to the 4th Century.

EMC’s sponsorship forms part of its
‘Information Heritage Initiative’, which works to protect and preserve the
world’s information for future generations and make it accessible in digital
form for research and education purposes. Working with its systems integrator
partner Dedagroup spa, EMC will provide 2.8PB of storage capacity – enough to store
the 40 million pages of digitized manuscript – across its Isilon scale-out
NAS, Atmos object storage, Data Domain and NetWorker backup and
recovery solutions and VNX unified storage solutions over the first phase
of the nine-year project, which is expected to take three years.

Past EMC Information Heritage initiatives
include: supporting the JFK Library (Boston, USA) in the process of digitizing
and archiving its entire collection; creating a high-resolution, 3D digital
reconstruction of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Codex of Flight’; supporting the
Herzogin Anna Amalia Library (Weimar, Germany), home to a unique collection of
Faust first editions; and sponsoring the Vatican’s Lux in Arcana exhibition,
which brought into the public domain for the first time in 400 years 100
original historical documents from the Vatican Secret Archive earlier in 2012.

The current digitization project brings
together a number of organizations and institutional partners, including Oxford University’s
Bodleian Library, the Polonsky Foundation and the University of Heidelberg.

Monsignor Cesare Pasini, prefect, Vatican
Apostolic Library, said: "The
Apostolic Library contains some of the oldest texts in the world that represent
a priceless legacy of history and culture. It’s very important that these
documents are protected, and at the same time made available to scholars around
the world. Thanks to the generosity and expertise of supporters such as EMC we
are able to meet these goals, preserving a treasure-trove of rare and unique
texts in a format that will not suffer from the passage of time."

Gianni Camisa, MD, Dedagroup
ICT Network, said: "This
is a highly complex project of immense cultural value. We are pleased to offer
our expertise around dematerialization to a complex project of such historical
significance. We take great pride in our involvement in the digitization of the
Apostolic Library."

Michele Liberato, president, EMC Italy, said: "To
manage and protect information is part of our mission. The Apostolic Library is
one of the oldest libraries in the world and we have a duty to ensure that the
knowledge and beauty of the manuscripts in it are available to all in the
future. This project will help to preserve and make available a unique heritage
of knowledge."

Marco Fanizzi, country manager, EMC Italy, said: "Where
once knowledge and information would have been stored on the page, facilitated
by the scriptoria or later the printing press, today EMC serves the same
purpose through our storage technologies. The collaboration with the Apostolic
Library is an incredibly important project and will provide future generations
with access to knowledge and insight that may otherwise have been lost."