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Comment by apaprocki | Hacker News Reader

It's important to note how restricted all of this wealth of knowledge is. They could allow anyone with curiosity or interest to research for their own reasons, but they don't. I was actually curious if this behavior would change under the new Pope.

    Qualified scholars from institutions of higher education
    pursuing scientific researches, with an adequate knowledge
    of archival research, could apply for an entry card.
    Scholars need an introductory letter by either a recognized
    institute of research or by a suitably qualified person in
    the field of historical research. Applicants need to specify
    their personal data (name, address etc.) as well as the
    purpose of their research. Undergraduate students are not
    admitted.

I have mixed feelings because if they wanted to be open they would just become open. Given all their restrictions it really comes off as if they want to "control the message" regarding anything they have collected over the centuries.

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That strikes me as being less about controlling the message and more about making sure that the people entering the library know how to handle manuscripts that old (especially the part about not allowing undergraduates...). Digitizing the works opens them up to everyone anyway so it's not as though they're withholding anything for reasons other than lack of the resources to digitize the entire collection (hey, contribute!).

If they wanted to hide something it wouldn't be in a library anyway, it would have been burned or stashed in a private vault somewhere.

That quote seems more like standard preservation concerns, and exactly what I would say if I had a museum of 400+ year old paper documents that I didn't want destroyed by people without adequate respect for their history.

See my sister comment -- I would also add not everything in church history in the archives is a 1400 AD vellum manuscript. It's great that they put 4,000 manuscripts online, but the library has tens of kilometers of shelving.

There have also been past events in history that disagree with what you are saying. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive_of_the_Congregation_fo...

This stems from the concern (valid, in my opinion) of preserving the collection. If you let just anyone enter the physical library to access it, your risk would be higher that someone would accidentally damage or take some of the collection.

For what it's worth, my understanding is that the Library of Congress has similar restrictions for accessing at least some of their archives.

Keep in mind these are the restrictions for the entire archive. Here, on the other hand, are the policies just for the LoC Rare Book & Specialized Collection Reading Room:

http://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/policies.html

tl;dr I can walk in and look at some rare books.

The National Archives is similar, as well as NYC's archives downtown. I've been in both and have easily handled old-but-not-so-old (1800s) volumes. Putting that kind of restriction on the entire archives throws the baby out with the bathwater.

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