Researching in the Vatican Library

Today the Vatican Library actually consists of a number of different archives. The archives are still held in the same place, to the left of the colonnades of St. Peter, which has housed the Holy Office of the Inquisition since 1566.
In order to use the archives all applicants must satisfy the condition which states, “The Archives are open to qualified scholars from institutions of higher education pursuing academic research.” Just being a “qualified scholar” does not guarantee access, however. Technically, the Pope approves all applicants, but the prefect of the archives actually reviews and decides who makes the cut. The entire collection employs a variety of indices, cross-referencing lists, and other cataloguing tools professional archivists call finding aids to help researchers identify what they would like to review but the files are all numbered, although there is no index. This effectively requires the researcher to know the number before he or she can call anything up. Research must fill out a written request to review a specific item or items (only 3 allowed per day) and once approved they must wait for a staff member to go and retrieve it off the shelf. On a day when library attendance is light, books, articles and manuscripts appear in 15 minutes. More often the wait is half an hour. On a crowded day at midmorning, however you can wait for an hour for materials to arrive. Browsing is forbidden and a Vatican staff member must accompany visitors at all times.
Books are organized and shelved mainly by the collection that they came from i.e. Cardinal Chigi’s collection bear the locator “Chigiana” or Cardinal Rossi’s donations are labeled “Rossiana”. Vaults are not the rule, and climate control is only just beginning to be employed. To the outsider it may seem odd that these holdings are kept largely without climate control that readers are allowed to turn pages of rare materials without the white gloves. In truth the worst physical obstacle to research in the Vatican library and the Papal Secret Archive is that facing a visitor of any Italian collection in the scorching heat of a Roman summer-the lack of air-conditioning. Until quite recently it was required that men wear suit or sport coats in these facilities and that women wear dresses below that knee and have their shoulders covered. Now these rules have been relaxed. Jackets can be shed; short skirts are tolerated, up to a point. But conservative dress is still the norm and conservative standards are enforced.

After reading these books, I found the various essays and the research quite interesting and wanted to learn more about the real Vatican Library.

‘It isn’t so secret after all’ by Michael Herra. Taken from Secrets of Angels and Demons: the unauthorized guide to the bestselling novel/ Dan Burstein and Arne de Keijzer.
Fallen order: intrigue, heresy and scandal in the Rome of Galileo and Caravaggio/Karen Liebreich