Vatican library says that if they keep cataloging at this rate, they’ll be done in 350 years or so, maybe “only” 40 to get just an outline of the collection. Read about some of the hassles involved in cataloging for the Vatican Library.
Proverbio pulls out a small, notebook-sized Turkish manuscript containing economic data about the Ottoman Empire in the mid 1600s.It’s missing the first eight pages and the last few pages. There’s no author listed, date or index. Yet it’s full of nuggets of information that might be of interest to scholars – so much so that Proverbio has produced 10 pages of catalogue information and he’s only halfway through. How long has it taken? “Two months, I’m ashamed to say,” he says. [thanks jude]