The Medici Online
Boston Globe Editorial
February 9, 2001
In scope and complexity, it resembles nothing so much as the mapping of the human genome, but the scholars with laptops sitting around a table in Florence, Italy, are trying to identify and index not the genes of the human body but the 2 million to 3 million documents in the archives of the Medici dynasty...When it is done, 15 to 18 years from now, the world will have a digitized database of the paper trail for two centuries of Medici influence.
