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Thursday, April 12, 2012

Bodleian and Vatican libraries to digitise ancient texts

Bodleian and Vatican libraries to digitise ancient textsThe Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana are announcing a new collaborative digitization project with the aim of opening up repositories of ancient texts and 1.5 million pages from their remarkable collections freely available online to researchers and the general public worldwide.

The initiative has been made possible by a £2 million award from the Polonsky Foundation. Dr Leonard Polonsky whose passion, interest and commitment is to democratize access to information, sees increasing digital access to these two library collections, among the greatest in the world, as a significant step in sharing the wealth of resources on a global scale.

Dr Polonsky, said: '21st-century technology provides the opportunity for collaborations between cultural institutions in the way they manage, disseminate and make available for research the information, knowledge and expertise they hold. I am pleased to support this exciting new project where the Bodleian Libraries and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana will make important collections accessible to scholars and the general public worldwide.'

Driven by the same vision of opening up their collections, the two institutions have recently established a partnership brokered by the Bodleian's Centre for the Study of the Book. The digitization project builds on the existing relationship between the two institutions

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