As part of a collaborative effort involving the Vatican Library, the Assyrian Church of the East and BYU, a collection of rare Christian manuscripts housed at the Vatican will be made accessible to scholars for the first time. The manuscripts were purchased by the Vatican from an Egyptian monastery where access to them had been restricted for centuries. 14,000 pages of text have been digitized to produce a digital library of 33 Syriac Christian manuscripts that will soon be available on DVD.

According to the article Brigham Young University Digitizes Syriac Text from Vatican by Beth Mardutho that appeared in the March 29, 2004 issue of Zinda Magazine, “in 1997, Bishop Mar Bawai Soro of the Assyrian Church of the East approached the BYU Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts about creating a digital library of Syriac Christian texts.” The article has some wonderful photos of the work in progress inside the Vatican Library. There is also a fantastic image of Syriac text included.

References
Mardutho, Beth. Brigham Young University Digitizes Syriac Text from Vatican.Zinda Magazine; March 29, 2004