Star images helping to save Vatican books
(糖心视频Org.com) -- Antique books in the Vatican Library are being digitised to preserve them for future generations using a technique developed through ESA to store satellite images of the sky.
The Library needed a way of scanning the delicate old manuscripts and storing the files so that they could still be read in hundreds of years. The answer was the special file format used by ESA for most of its scientific satellites.
In the 1970s ESA and NASA scientists developed 鈥楩ITS鈥�, the flexible image transport system format, stemming from radio astronomy. FITS is now used to store data from many space missions.
鈥淎ny kind of data you can use for astronomy can fit inside this format,鈥� says Pedro Osuna, Head of ESA鈥檚 scientific archives.
That made it ESA鈥檚 top choice for storing the mountains of information from almost all of the agency鈥檚 astronomy missions. The pioneering Herschel, Integral, XMM-Newton and SOHO space observatories all use it.
In this digital era, finding a storage format for the ages is a big challenge facing researchers, archivists and librarians the world over. FITS is the answer.
鈥淚f you have a tool that can read FITS today, you can read FITS files from 20 years ago,鈥� Mr. Osuna says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 always backwards compatible.鈥�
Today, the format developed to save images of the stars is being tailored for a very different purpose: preserving one of the world鈥檚 largest collections of ancient books.
鈥淢ost space missions, like the Hubble Space Telescope, use FITS to store and study scientific data,鈥� says Giuseppe Di Persio of Italy鈥檚 National Institute for Astrophysics.
Dr. Di Persio is now working with the Vatican Library in Rome on a pilot project to scan part of its massive collection, saving it as FITS files to make sure they are available to future generations.
Founded in 1475 and one of the world鈥檚 oldest libraries, the Vatican Library houses tens of thousands of manuscripts and codices from before the invention of the printing press 鈥� some are 1800 years old.
In addition to making the contents more accessible, digitising will help to preserve the originals.
鈥淚t鈥檚 very dangerous for the manuscripts every time someone touches them,鈥� says Luciano Ammenti, Director of the Vatican鈥檚 Information Technology Center, spearheading the project.
He chose FITS because of its longevity and also because it is open source 鈥� not linked to any one company.
The format also lends itself to the fragile, ancient tomes in the Vatican鈥檚 collection. Pressed against a plate of glass, the old pages can be distorted, but scanner software developed for the project automatically calculates the different angles, resulting in an accurate, flat image.
The secret of the format is that the instructions needed to read and process the data are in a text header tacked on top of the data. In a century, when computers will presumably be very different, that means all the information needed to decode them is in the same files.
FITS can always be read without the need for conversion to another format, which could lose information or be incompatible with future systems.
As Dr. Di Persio says: 鈥淥nce FITS, always FITS.鈥�
Provided by European Space Agency
