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Showing posts with label Vatican Library. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vatican Library. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Vatican and Bodleian Libraries Launch Online Archive of Ancient Religious Texts

Website funding from Polonsky Foundation includes Bodleian's 1455 Gutenberg Bible and aims to put 1.5m pages online

Radcliffe Square, Oxford University. The Bodleian Library, together with the Vatican, is putting thousands of religious texts online. Photograph: Alamy

By Maev Kennedy

Some of the rarest and most fragile religious texts in the Vatican and Bodleian libraries, including ancient bibles and some of the oldest Hebrew manuscript and printed books, are being placed online in a joint project by the two great libraries, which will eventually create an online archive of 1.5m pages.

The website launched on Tuesday with funding from the Polonsky Foundation includes the first results of the four-year project, including the Bodleian's 1455 Gutenberg Bible, one of only 50 surviving copies of the first major book printed in the west with metal type.