One of my favorite technology initiatives at EMC is the digital preservation project at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. The project is cool on a number of levels. It has a state-of-the-art digital archive assembled with a wide variety of EMC products. It is locally relevant for me, given that I grew up in Massachusetts. And of course it has national (and international) significance for those researchers that want online access to JFK material.
In November 2012 the EMC TV team headed to Rome to document the newest Information Heritage preservation project.
The Bibliotheca Apostolica (as the Vatican Library is known) is one of the oldest libraries in the world. It contains more than 80,000 historic books, documents, papyrus texts and other ancient manuscripts. In order to further preserve the manuscripts and make them available to scholars and historians around the world, the Vatican is launching a multi-year project to digitize, store, archive and make the entire collection available on line.
As with the JFK Library, the archive will be assembled with a variety of EMC products, including VNX, Isilon, Atmos, Networker, and Data Domain. EMC consultants, in partnership with systems integrator Dedagroup, are working with the curators at the Vatican on designing a 2.8 petabyte system. It is estimated that a system of this size should be capable of preserving approximately 40 million documents.
The video below was the result of EMC TV's unprecedented access to the Vatican library, reading rooms, archives, and preservation rooms. The footage includes some rare books and manuscripts that are not typically accessible to the public. During the video you will notice that a small camera was mounted to the scanning machine. The digitization process used by the technicians was recorded as well. Appearing on screen is Timothy Janz, Scriptor Graecus of the Vatican, and Luciano Ammenti, Coordinator of the data center for the Vatican Library.
As with the JFK Library, I am hoping to track the progress of this initiative over the next few years and document the best practices that continue to emerge as digital preservation technology advances.
Steve
Twitter: @SteveTodd
EMC Fellow