Comments on: Digitizing Venice’s 1,000-year-old archives

By: wayne

wayne — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 22:50:22 +0000

This is an interesting development.

I would pivot slightly and again highly recommend:
The Internet Archive
http://archive.org/about/

(They are a massive outgrowth of the “Prelinger Archive,” which began by preserving “ephemeral films,” and making them available free on-line.)

-“The Internet Archive is a 501(c)(3) non-profit library. Founded in 1996, our mission is to provide –Universal Access to All Knowledge.”
-“We began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral – but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it. Today we have 20+ years of web history accessible through the “Wayback Machine,” comprising 279 billion web-pages.”
-“Not everyone has access to a public or academic library with a good collection, so to provide universal access we need to provide digital versions of books. We began a program to digitize books in 2005 and today we scan 1,000 books per day in 28 locations around the world. Books published prior to 1923 are available for download, with hundred’s of thousands of newer books available through our Open Library Project.”
“A single copy of the Internet Archive library collection occupies 30+ Petabytes of server space (and we store at least 2 copies of everything).”

–they have 11 million books currently scanned, in multiple formats. Special attention is paid to non-destructive scanning techniques, and they developed all their equipment from modified off-the-shelf products.

By: wodun

wodun — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 22:45:48 +0000

until the Polish knights under King John Sobieski crushed the Ottoman armies outside the gates of Vienna over a century later.

They recently made a movie about this, not a documentary. It had a lot of potential but ended up not being all that great. The costumes were cool though.

It might still be on Netflix.

By: Ted

Ted — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 21:22:40 +0000

I wonder if they have done this with the 220,000 volumes in the Long Room at Trinity College in Ireland?

By: Dick Eagleson

Dick Eagleson — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 20:44:42 +0000

Having made a day-trip to Venice from Milan, where I was working at the time (1978) this fascinates me. I will be especially interested in whatever these archives reveal in the way of new information about the formation of the Holy League and the subsequent Battle of Lepanto (1571) in which the Ottoman Turks were frustrated in one of their numerous and ongoing attempts to conquer Europe for Islam. Venice supplied over half the ships in the Holy League’s victorious fleet. Lepanto was the worst reverse the Ottoman Turks would suffer until the Polish knights under King John Sobieski crushed the Ottoman armies outside the gates of Vienna over a century later.

By: LocalFluff

LocalFluff — Thu, 15 Jun 2017 17:54:33 +0000

Venetian, please, not “Venice’s”.
I identify spam and stop reading when I hit abominations like that in the first sentence. I just assume it’s some UFO-abductionist sitting on a keyboard and I don’t have time for that. They literally don’t know what they are writing about. I mean literally illiterate. I expect that experts on researching the archives of Venice know how to spell the very city’s name.