Sharing, preserving and exploiting digital collections at the Vatican Library

Abstract

This article outlines the two main purposes of the Vatican Library digitization project (long-term digital preservation and dissemination of contents), focusing on the exploitation of digital assets and providing the humanities with a new way to study the ancient roots of knowledge. The article describes the LTDP (Long Term Data Preservation) pipeline, and the choice of preservation format based on sustainability factors and focuses on the LTDP archives requirements in light of the UNI 11845:2022 standard. The dissemination pipeline describes the digital library platform and demonstrates the Vatican Library’s adoption of the IIIF protocol (International Image Interoperability Framework). Finally, the article describes a pilot project relating to the use of AI for the recognition of iconographic details in illuminations, with the peculiarity of managing the results of the artificial neural network within IIIF annotations.

Keywords

• digital library
• long-term digital preservation
• interoperability
• machine learning
• digital humanities