2.8 PETABYTES!?!?! (Vatican Library being digitized)

WDTPRS ^ | March 7, 2013 | Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

[NYer]

At InfoDocket there is a story describing the project to digitize the Vatican Library.

Get this!

EMC Corporation has today announced that it is providing 2.8 petabytes of storage to help the Vatican Apostolic Library digitize its entire catalogue 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.

Do you remember “Doc’s” reaction to how much electricity was needed to power the DeLorean? We are all used to hearing “giga-” these days. But this is “peta-”

Our hard drives are now in gigabytes and terabytes. I remember when having megabytes was a big deal.

The prefixes indicate multipliers. kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, peta- etc.

Prefix	Symbol(s)	Power of 10	Power of 2
yocto-	y	10-24 *	–
zepto-	z	10-21 *	–
atto-	a	10-18 *	–
femto-	f	10-15 *	–
pico-	p	10-12 *	–
nano-	n	10-9 *	–
micro-	m	10-6 *	–
milli-	m	10-3 *	–
centi-	c	10-2 *	–
deci-	d	10-1 *	–
(none)	–	100	20
deka-	D	101 *	–
hecto-	h	102 *	–
kilo-	k or K **	103	210
mega-	M	106	220
giga-	G	109	230
tera-	T	1012	240
peta-	P	1015	250
exa-	E	1018 *	260
zetta-	Z	1021 *	270
yotta-	Y	1024 *	280
* Not generally used to express data speed
** k = 103 and K = 210

[ArrogantBustard]

Wonder if info is mannually

From previous threads, it was quite clear that they're making very high resolution scans of the documents. Scholars (amateur and professional) will be as interested in the details of the calligraphy and illumination of the documents as they will be in the actual text thereof.

[Ole Okie]

My father used to program computers with punch cards.

I started using a Card Programmed Calculator in about 1955. We not only used punched cards for programs, but we wired boards for trignometric functions.

[libstripper]

"After all, if you're going to that much trouble, you might as well go state of the art the first time to minimize additional handling of the originals." My (I'm somewhat Protestant) one experience with the Vatican, when I visited it in June of 1998, was entirely positive and left me with great admiration for the Church, indeed, far more than I have for mainstream Protestantism. What's particularly notable is the massive, spare no resources, effort the Church makes to spread the faith. That particularly includes its very reasonably priced publications that are often made to National Geographic print and photo quality standards. The one that particularly stands out is a booklet about the Sistine Chapel that includes a really spectacular center fold high gloss color photo of its ceiling. If they do their library the same way, the results will be fantastic. I really hope they do a first rate picture of each original and accompany that picture with equally good translations in each of the world's major languages.

[SunkenCiv]

GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach	join list or digest view topics view or post blog bookmark post a topic subscribe
Thanks NYer. ...EMC gives Vatican Library 2.8PB to store manuscripts [3/07/2013] Just adding to the catalog, not sending a general distribution. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.