Today in 1995, William D. Montalbano at the Los Angeles Times reported on Father Leonard Boyle, the director of the Apostolic Vatican Library, who is "bringing the computer to the Middle Ages and the Vatican library to the world."
The library on the Web, says Boyle, “will last forever.” Boyle asks “How the blazes did we do without computers?” but makes an important distinction between the value of providing access to curious people around the world and the importance of the originals documents to scholars: "There is a qualitative difference between any digitalized copy and hard parchment or paper which has its own watermarks and discolorations as testimony to its own history. A manuscript copy is a living thing, the annotations, the slightly different text. True scholars will never be satisfied with digitalized copies alone.”
In 2014, PBS reported:
The Vatican Apostolic Library is undertaking an extensive digital preservation of its 82,000 document collection. Over the course of a few years, with the assistance of Japanese company NTT DATA, the library has catalogued nearly 4,500 manuscripts online — and it hopes to reach the 15,000 mark within the next four years.
Monsignor Cesare Pasini, Prefect of the Vatican Apostolic Library, called the project a “true effort in favour of the conservation and dissemination of knowledge at the service of culture throughout the world;” writing on the library’s site that the project could eventually lead to 40 million digitized pages and 43 petabytes worth of data.
The entire undertaking is expected to take at least 15 years and cost more than $63 million dollars — an effort the Vatican Library is attempting to support, in part, by crowdsourcing funding.