Vatican Apostolic Library Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV)

Overview

The Vatican Apostolic Library (Latin: Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana; Italian: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana), commonly known as the Vatican Library, is the official library of the Holy See, located within the Vatican Palace in Vatican City. It is one of the oldest and most significant libraries in the world, and serves as a major research institution for history, theology, law, philosophy, and the sciences.

History and Founding

The Vatican Library traces its origins to the earliest libraries of the Roman pontiffs, though its formal establishment is dated to June 15, 1475, when Pope Sixtus IV issued the papal bull Ad decorem militantis Ecclesiae. Earlier, Pope Nicholas V (1447–1455) had substantially enlarged the papal book collection by acquiring remnants of the imperial library of Constantinople after its fall to the Ottoman Turks. Pope Julius II and later Sixtus V further expanded the institution; under Sixtus V, the architect Domenico Fontana constructed the current main library hall. After a period of closure, Pope Leo XIII reopened the library in 1883 and modernized it, changing the title of its head to Prefect. In 2010, a major digitization project began with the goal of eventually placing the entire manuscript collection online.

Collections and Holdings

The Vatican Library holds approximately 75,000 codices and manuscripts, over 1.1 million printed books (including some 8,500 incunabula), archival collections, printed materials, graphic materials, coins, medals, and art objects. It maintains separate departments for manuscripts and archival collections, printed books and drawings, acquisitions and cataloguing, coin collections and museums, and restoration and photography. Particularly notable are its rare and ancient manuscripts, including texts in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopic. The library has approximately 80 staff members. A reading room for periodicals, the Periodical Reading Room, opened to the public in 2002, and the Salone Sistino reading room opened in October 2017.

Media and Journalism Collections

While primarily a repository of religious, historical, and scholarly manuscripts, the Vatican Library holds extensive periodical collections and historical pamphlets. Its digitization program, launched in 2010 in partnership with institutions including Stanford University Libraries, has made tens of thousands of manuscripts and rare books accessible online through the DigiVatLib platform.

Access and Usage

The Vatican Library is open to qualified scholars who can document their research needs; a scholars' admission card is required. Photocopies of pages from books published between 1601 and 2008 may be ordered, and photographic reproductions are available for scholarly publications. The Vatican Film Library in St. Louis, Missouri, at Saint Louis University, holds microfilms of more than 37,000 works from the Vatican Library, making its holdings more accessible to North American researchers.