Francis P. Giordano

Toward online, worldwide access to Vatican Library materials

The Vatican Library is an extraordinary repository of rare books and manuscripts. Among its 150,000 manuscripts are early copies of works by Aristotle, Dante, Euclid, Homer, and Virgil. Yet today access to the Library is limited. Because of the time and cost required to travel to Rome, only some 2000 scholars can afford to visit the Library each year. Through the Vatican Library Project, we are exploring the practicality of providing digital library services that extend access to portions of the Librarys collections to scholars worldwide, as an early example of providing digital library services that extend and complement traditional library services. A core goal of the project is to provide access via the Internet to some of the Librarys most valuable manuscripts, printed books, and other sources to a scholarly community around the world. A multinational, multidisciplinary team is addressing the technical challenges raised by that goal, including • Development of a multiserver system suitable for providing information to scholars worldwide. • Capture of images of the materials with faithful color and sufficient detail to support scholarly study. Protection of the on-line materials, especially images, from misappropriation. • Development of tools to enable scholars to locate desired materials. • Development of tools to enable scholars to scrutinize images of manuscripts. • In this paper, we provide an overview of the project, a description of the system being developed to satisfy its needs, and a discussion of how the technical challenges are being addressed.

Populating the Hermitage Museum's new web site

Experts from around the world tackle one of the most ambitious Web-based museum projects and the result captures the true artistry of teamwork, technology, and yes, art.

Evolution of a high-quality digital imaging system

A digital imaging system that produces high image quality is not created by inspirational design alone, but evolves over time as the challenges posed by new applications are met. Our experience over the last ten years have led to a versatile high quality imaging systems. In this talk, we will describe some of the system challenges encountered and the enhancements incorporated to address them.

Packaging the IBM Blue Gene/Q supercomputer

The IBM Blue Gene®/Q supercomputer is designed for highly efficient computing for problems dominated by floating-point computation. Its target mean time between failures for a 96-rack, 98, 304-node system is three days, allowing tasks requiring computation for many days to run at scale, with little time wasted on checkpoint-restart operations. This paper describes various elements of the compute application-specific integrated circuit and the system package, and how they contribute to low power consumption and high reliability.

Performance evaluation of a high-quality TDI-CCD color scanner

The camera design and performance evaluation of a high-quality TDI-CCD digital color scanner is described. The camera head design which has been described elsewhere [1 2] is briefly overviewed. Scanner characteristics such as dark current temperature effects white field uniformity color filters and filter wheel mechanical design resolution and MTF and noise at low signal levels are described. A companion paper [3] describes some other characteristics of this scanner. 1.

Time delay and integration imagers and their applications to image acquisition cameras

A family of experimental time-delay and integration (TDI) charge-coupled imaging devices has been designed and built using a minimally-modified logic/memory NMOS process. These imagers yield more favorable tradeoffs between image quality, speed, and illumination than conventional linear imagers and are suitable for high-speed scanning of color or monochrome documents at low illumination power. The design and construction of a prototype scanning camera using the 3072*32 TDI devices is also described. Intended for publishing applications, the camera is capable of capturing both monochrome and color images. At half-page document size, the scanning resolution is 300 pixels/in. Special color filters are used to produce colorimetric outputs. Both reflective and transmissive illumination are provided to scan both prints and transparencies of various sizes.<<ETX>>