OSV STORY FOR JULY 7

TECHNOLOGY

Surfing the Church on the Net

Soon it will be possible to access by computer the rarest holdings of the Church's many libraries in Rome

By Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda

Log on to the world of the 16th century. Click your mouse over the name identifying Rome's Gregorian University library and read a book from 1590 on the Reformation. Move your cursor and click your mouse twice, and within minutes, proceed to connect with the online library of the Pontifical Oriental Institute, where you can browse through 19th-century Russian periodicals.

Welcome to the world of the Information Superhighway. Soon you, too, can access centuries-old treasures overseas without ever leaving your home.

Led by the initiative of the Gregorian University Consortium, more than a dozen pontifical universities in Rome have created an official union with a common computerized project that will connect library listings -- and in many cases electronic copies -- of their holdings.

Upon completion, the project will not only network the numerous institutions of higher learning housed in Rome with one another, but it will also make the information available to researchers around the world through the Internet.

"Now we are aboard the same train," said Jesuit Father P. Giuseppe Pittau, rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University. "We have put all our energies, our resources and our cultural riches together to offer a better service not only to our habitual users, but to open our doors to the outside world."

Father Pittau is also president of the Roman Union of Ecclesiastical Libraries, the ecclesiastical and cultural association of 14 institutions of higher learning in Rome.

The computerized alliance allows the universities' libraries, which often operate on restricted budgets, to share resources, specialties and the more than 3.3 million volumes currently available. The network also aspires to be a model for other institutions of higher education throughout the world.

"We hope that this beginning will be like a small seed that will grow into a gigantic tree in whose shade many, many people will find solace," Father Pittau said.

Though the process of creating an electronic copy of rare books is relatively inexpensive, it is very time consuming.

At $10 or less per book, the procedure consists of copying the book page by page onto a disk.

Creating a copy of the book onto a portable disk enables researchers to read the book on a computer screen. Once entered into the library network system, the book is also available for examination at other locations in the network or on the Internet.

In other words, a student at any university in the world who is interested in reading a rare book housed in Rome can find out which university library has it and connect through the Internet with the Gregorian University library and read the book online.

"These highly specialized libraries are a treasure for the world of scholarship," explained Jesuit Father Eugene O'Brien, president of the Gregorian Foundation. "It is important that we join the fraternity of people who today are putting their wealth and treasures of their libraries onto the Internet or some form of networking."

Father O'Brien, who is in charge of collecting funds in the United States for the project, estimates that the process of computerizing the holdings and of electronically copying the books will take at least three years, a trivial time frame in historical years.

By electronically reproducing the books, Father O'Brien said, "you give them a shelf life of 800 years."

The extensive process of transposing the libraries' catalogs from the current manual card system into a computerized network has already begun.

"Considering that through the ages the Church's acceptance of scientific invention has been slow, this is -- in comparative terms -- rather speedy," Father O'Brien said with a smile.

Rooted in the Roman College founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola in 1551, the Gregorian University Consortium is the first group of institutions in Rome to begin to computerize their 1.2 million bound volumes in their library listings. The consortium consists of the Pontifical Gregorian University, the Pontifical Oriental Institute and the Pontifical Biblical Institute.

The Gregorian Consortium joined forces in 1991 with other institutions in Rome to create the Roman Union of Ecclesiastical Libraries (URBE) in order to promote automation as a network. Since 1991, eight more academic institutions became part of the group.

The institutions that make up URBE are: the Alphonsian Academy, the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Pontifical Athenaeum St. Anselm, the Pontifical Athenaeum Antonianum, the Pontifical Faculty of Sciences of Education Auxilium, the Pontifical Biblical Institute, the Centro Pro Unione, the Gregorian University, the Pontifical Theological Faculty Marianum, the Pontifical Oriental Institute, Athenaeum Regina Apostolorum, the Pontifical Salesian University, the Roman Atheneum of the Holy Cross and the Pontifical Urban University.

Gregorian University, the largest and oldest of the institutions in the consortium, has more than 4,000 students and is 445 years old.

According to Father O'Brien, Gregorian's library alone holds a large number of rare books that are "in dire need of being rescued" because of the climatic conditions in Rome.

All the ecclesiastical libraries are working with scholars, linguists and computer experts to electronically reproduce the most priceless books first, as well as to restore the ones that are disintegrating due to age. In March, the specialists began to electronically duplicate the books in the poorest condition.

In addition to being electronically duplicated, the rare books found to be in the worst condition will also undergo a specialized process to restore the original manuscript -- a much more expensive procedure costing approximately $200 a book.

"Some of these books are priceless," Father O'Brien said. "These are books that go back four centuries and are enormously important for the historical study of theology, Church history or canon law."

In order to properly care for their holdings, the consortium libraries have also had to modernize the physical facilities to incorporate air and temperature controls for appropriate storage.

Because of the numerous languages -- including Hebrew, Arabic, Greek and Cyrillic (Russian) -- and the multiscript nature of the books in the URBE association, one of the greatest challenges in their computerization was to find a viable computer program.

To accomplish this task, URBE adopted the Automated Library Expandable Program (ALEPH), a multilingual and multi-script computer program conceived and developed in Israel at Hebrew University.

Used in 17 different countries, the ALEPH program incorporates the use of biblical and prebiblical languages.

Father O'Brien emphasized that the cultural heritage of the various libraries of the URBE association is notable not just for the quantity of documents that each one holds, but for the various specializations that are found in each institution, such as Scripture, oriental studies, ecumenism, social sciences, Latin literature and even Marxism, containing the largest resources outside Russia itself.

Once the Rome libraries are fully online, the treasures housed within them will be available to professional and amateur scholars throughout the world on the Internet.

"This is a real sign," Father O'Brien said, "when Church institutions are leaping into the 21st century. It's a wonderful thing. You can see it changing the life of the university."

And it will inevitably change all of cyberspace.

Scaperlanda writes from Norman, Okla. Gregorian University can be reached on the Net at http://199.98.32.14

A glossary to the Information Superhighway

*CYBERSPACE: A term coined by William Gibson in his 1984 futuristic novel, "Neuromancer," which refers to places that exist only inside computers.

*NET: Short for network, which is a group of computers linked together for sharing information. It is also the generic term for the Internet or cyberspace.

*INTERNET: Literally defined as "between networks." The Internet is neither hardware nor software; rather, it defines a set of rules for communications between computers connected to the Internet. The Internet is an enormous network of networks connecting people and their computers to others around the world via a modem.

*MODEM: A device -- either internal or external -- that connects your computer to a telephone line.

*WORLD WIDE WEB: An interconnected collection of more than 50,000 sites, or home pages -- growing at the rate of almost 1,000 a day. Web sites or home pages can be set up by individuals or institutions.

*DATABASE: Information grouped by subject and accessible by various key words related to the subject. For example, "Gettysburg" -- the name of the battle, the city, the TV mini-series and all the particulars of each could all be contained in a Civil War database.

*LOG ON: A set of commands and/or codes initiated by the computer user to gain access to a network.

-- Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda

Copyright Our Sunday Visitor 1996; from the 7-7-96 edition

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