"The Vatican Library <http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2010/04/20/news/biblioteca_vaticana -3489668/> plans to digtize 80,000 manuscripts <http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/archives.html> and store them in the open data format FITS <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITS> , originally developed for astronomy and maintained under the IAU <http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/iaufwg/> . The result is expected to be 40 million pages and 45 petabytes <http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2010/03/80000-vatican-m ss-to-be-digitized.html> . FITS was chosen because it 'has been used for more than 40 years for the conservation of data concerning spatial missions and, in the past decade, in astrophysics and nuclear medicine. It permits the conservation of images with neither technical nor financial problems in the future, since it is systematically updated by the international scientific community.'" via slashdot http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/04/28/1814221/Vatican-Chooses-Open -FITS-Image-Format --- Hanan Cohen Webmaster Bloomfield Science Museum Jerusalem www.mada.org.il <http://www.mada.org.il/en/> - Facebook <http://www.facebook.com/pages/-/127569645760> - Twitter <http://twitter.com/madajerusalem> - YouTube <http://www.youtube.com/user/madajerusalem>
