Greetings.
Here's a slight curiousity. FITS is a primarily astronomical image (and other data) format, which was first standardised in 1981, and is now essentially ubiquitous in astronomy and allied sciences. There a hint at its age in the observation that it is defined in terms of 80 byte 'card images' (oh yes...).
Although archival uses have long been part of FITS goals, I don't think that storing images of manuscripts was part of the original plan, three decades ago.
Best wishes,
Norman
[this is on-topic for this list, yes?]
Begin forwarded message:
> From: William Pence <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 2010 April 27 18:08:05 GMT+01:00
> To: FITSBITS <[log in to unmask]>
> Subject: [fitsbits] The Vatican adopts FITS
>
> Here is an interesting announcement from the Vatican about their plans
> to create a digital archive of manuscripts in the Vatican Library in
> FITS format. It's a 10 year project that will eventually contain 40
> million manuscript pages and will total 45 petabytes in size.
>
> A couple blog entries are here:
>
> http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/archives.html
> http://evangelicaltextualcriticism.blogspot.com/2010/03/80000-vatican-mss-to-be-digitized.html
>
> And an Italian newspaper article is here:
> http://www.repubblica.it/tecnologia/2010/04/20/news/biblioteca_vaticana-3489668/
> (babel fish gives a fairly coherent translation to English)
>
> They chose to use the FITS format over alternatives like tiff, pdf or
> Jpg 2000 because it is a simple, free, open-source, well-documented
> archival format that should survive technical evolutions and still be
> readable well into the future.
>
> Bill Pence
> --
> ____________________________________________________________________
> Dr. William Pence [log in to unmask]
> NASA/GSFC Code 662 HEASARC +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
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--
Norman Gray : http://nxg.me.uk
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