Microchips Keep Vatican Library Tidy

Keeping bookshelves tidy is at the best of times a chore. But when the bookshelves stretch 30 miles, it becomes something rather worse.

Custodians of the Vatican library, fed up with having to spend a month a year putting wayward items from their collection of 1.6m volumes and manuscripts back where they belong, are tagging them with microchips.

"The way things are now, if a book is not in its right place, it's as good as lost," said Ambrogio Piazzoni, the deputy prefect of the library.

With the introduction of the so-called RF-ID (radio frequency identification) technology, that should rapidly become a thing of the past.

"You just walk in front of a shelf and you can immediately see on the screen a list of all the books and their contents," Dr Piazzoni told the Italian news agency, Ansa. "If a book is missing, or in the wrong place, the computer signals the fact with an alarm sound."

RF-ID technology is widely used in warehousing and retailing. But this is thought to be the first time it has been used on such a scale in a library.

The tags contain a transponder with a digital memory chip which is given a unique electronic code, activated by a hand-held device which can read data from the chip.

The dangers of not knowing what is where were highlighted in 1996 when a professor from Ohio State University was jailed for 14 months after admitting that he had stolen pages torn from a Vatican manuscript once owned by the 14th-century poet Petrarch.

The library includes the oldest known complete Bible, Petrarch's notes for his two greatest works and a copy of the first book to be printed: a Gutenberg Bible.

The book collection includes no fewer than 8,200 "incunabula", works published before 1501 using moveable type.

But fewer than a third of its manuscripts have been catalogued, though the process began over 100 years ago.