Vatican and other Catholic libraries turn to AI and robotics to digitize collections

Vatican City, Oct 6, 2025 / 06:00 am

Long before cloud servers and computers, medieval Catholic monks preserved the intellectual inheritance of the ancient world by handwriting Greek and Latin manuscripts. Centuries later, the Vatican Library and other Catholic institutions in Rome are turning to new technologies, including digitization, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI), to ensure that patrimony endures.

The Vatican Apostolic Library, formally founded in the 15th century, is digitizing about 80,000 handwritten manuscripts, part of a collection that also includes 2 million books, 100,000 archival documents, and hundreds of thousands of coins, medals, and graphics.

“People often think of the Vatican Library as a dusty old place, but actually it has tended to be sort of on the cu