[dailyplanet]

The next step would be digitizing the books and manuscripts so scholars can collectively research the finding.

https://www.medievalists.net/?s=digitizing&submit=Search

I wonder what the cost of this digitization process would be and what research labs can render this service.

[foobarian]

I'm wondering the other side of it: given how fragile digital storage and peripherals are, are there efforts to transcribe books like this onto archival paper with archival inks? Seems it really would be kinda fun to have a modern day monastery copying books by hand like in the ancient times...

[giraffe_lady]

I'm not sure how common they are or precisely where it came from but I know someone with a hand-copied prayer book from the indian melankara church. I'm not sure when the original was made but this one was copied in the 1960s so is nearly a minor relic in its own right.

[WalterBright]

> given how fragile digital storage and peripherals are

Post it on the web. Lots of people will inevitably make copies, ensuring its survival.

[voynich]

I was just thinking about that. In my opinion, this find is sorta useless if these aren't digitalized and shared publicly.

To my knowledge, digitalization can be expensive, because they need hardware for high quality scans, and they have to be careful not to damage these books any further. I guess it all depends on the situation.

[Avicebron]

apropo username, having taken a crack at pulling relevant information out of scanned documents I agree that scan quality is very important (while often lengthy and expensive) especially if someone is trying to derive meaningful information from a digital copy without the physical copy to do a comparison with.

And from the look of the picture those books are massive and probably very delicate.

EDIT: to add a bit to the expensive part of this, it's expensive even with the willingness and resources to get it done, it's hard but unfortunately to even convince someone to dedicate these resources is a hurdle.

[WalterBright]

Your phone camera, hand held, is plenty good enough to digitize each page. Even if they don't lay flat. You could pay a student to just photograph each page. The cost is minimal.

Before anyone says "this will never work! It must be done by $$$$$ professionals! It requires $$$$ equipment!" just pick a book, any book, off your bookshelf, open it up, and take a phone photo.

P.S. It works better with daylight providing enough light through the windows.

[joshuahedlund]

You make a good point, but there also could be more to it than that:

- Need to make sure the photographers are careful not to damage fragile pages

- Need a system of organization (syncing ten thousand default-named iphone pics with no labels is not ideal)

- You might be ignoring important differences between modern published books on your bookshelf and these materials (ex. maybe font is not same size, maybe font is not modern English, maybe characters are not printed consistently, maybe pages are dirty, all of which could impact OCR-friendliness of an iphone pic compared to something else

- There might even be valuable information in markings below the topmost visible layer which could be revealed by scanning equipment (especially for example if pages are stuck together)

And that's just off the top of my head, without real domain knowledge.

[adhesive_wombat]

Scantailor Advanced will also help process the images into something resembling a readable scan.

But indeed, as long as you have some images you can dump then onto the Internet Archive for immediate posterity (and hope they don't go under when the lawsuit determines a penalty).