Vatican's bookmarks

VATICAN CITY -- Dealing with bug infestations, normal wear and tear, and even the occasional thief, keepers of the 15th century Vatican Apostolic Library face an ever-challenging task. Their latest step to keep their invaluable collection intact has been to employ some 21st century technology.

Officials have started implanting computer chips in the 1.6 million books in the Vatican's collection. The chips communicate by radio wave with hand-held monitors, so librarians can tell if a book is missing.

"That is no small thing, because a book that's out of place is as if the book is lost," says Ambrogio Piazzoni, the library's deputy prefect.

The technology has been around for a few years. But the Vatican believes its "Pergamon" system -- named for the ancient city in modern Turkey that housed one of the Old World's greatest libraries -- marks the first time that the system has been applied to a library catalogue on a large scale.

It's the latest advance for the Vatican Library, which was started by Pope Nicholas V in the 1450s with an initial 350 Latin manuscripts.

Today, the Vatican Library is known for its collection of manuscripts -- the one-of-a-kind, often beautifully illustrated handwritten books that predate the era of the printing press. With about 65,000 manuscripts, the Vatican collection is one of the best in the world, said John Lowden, director of the Research Center for Illuminated Manuscripts at the University of London's Courtauld Institute.

The library today is housed in a series of frescoed halls inside Vatican City that are open to scholars who request permission to do research. None of the items in the library can be checked out, and rules for researchers working there are strict: no pens, food or even mineral water are allowed in the manuscript reading room.

Scholars also must know exactly what they're looking for, since the manuscript collection -- like those of other great libraries -- is not entirely catalogued. In fact, only about 15,000 to 20,000 manuscripts have been logged so far since the modern process began in 1902, Piazzoni says.

"Which means that if we continue with the same criteria of cataloguing, we can assume that we'll finish in three and a half centuries," he says.

Aside from the manuscript backlog, the Vatican Library is also bedeviled by a problem common to other keepers of old books: bug infestations. Every so often the Vatican has to disinfect its collections.

The Vatican reported in 2002 that it had had "serious problems" with one particular infestation of paper-eating xylophagous insects in a few of its manuscript collections.

Then, there is a human problem.

"Each time we take a manuscript and use it, simply by opening it -- my breath, humidity, my temperature -- ruins the manuscript. Little by little, but it ruins it," Piazzoni says.

But simply keeping the manuscripts in a temperature and humidity controlled room forever isn't the answer, he says.

"The job of a library like ours is twofold," he says. "It's that of conserving that which we have received from the past for the future ... But we are also the future of yesterday. We have the right to read and to study things that have arrived from the past. So I must find the right balance."