The Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican Library) have joined efforts in a landmark digitization project

The Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican Library) have joined efforts in a landmark digitization project with the aim of opening up their repositories of ancient texts. Over the course of the next four years, 1.5 million pages from their remarkable collections will be made freely available online to researchers and to the general public. This initiative has been made possible by a £2 million award from the Polonsky Foundation. Dr Leonard Polonsky, who is committed to democratizing access to information, sees the increase of digital access to these two library collections — among the greatest in the world — as a significant step in sharing intellectual resources on a global scale.

Dr Polonsky says: ‘Twenty-first-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.’

The digitization project will focus on three main groups of texts: Hebrew manuscripts, Greek manuscripts, and incunabula, or 15th-century printed books. These groups have been chosen for their scholarly importance and for the strength of their collections in both libraries, and they will include both religious and secular texts. Another consideration has been the physical condition of the objects, prioritizing those which are robust enough to withstand the transportation to and the handlin at the imaging studio and the photographers.

The complete list of works to be digitized by the Bodleian and the Vatican can be accessed here for Greek manuscripts , here for Hebrew manuscripts, and here for incunabula. If you are working with materials from one of these subject areas and you would like to see a particular item digitized, you may submit your request to the relevant curator for review.

For the launch of the project, however, the two libraries, the Bodleian and Vatican, have focused on bringing to light a smaller group of Bibles and biblical commentaries, each of which has been chosen for its particular historical importance.

One of these manuscripts is a 13th-century Hebrew Bible originally collected by Benjamin Kennicott (MS Kennicott 3). It includes the Humash (Pentateuch) with Onkelos (Aramaic translation), the Five Scrolls (Song of Songs, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, and Esther) and Haftarot (selections from the books of Prophets). With both Masorahs and vocalized (except for the last two Haftarot on Ta‘anti). The manuscript was written in Ashkenaz in 1299. The digitized manuscript can be viewed here.

SOURCE:

Polonski Foundation Digitization Project

READ MORE:

The project has a dedicated blog