Between 2012 and 2017 the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford and the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Vatican Library) joined efforts in the landmark Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project with the aim of opening up their repositories of ancient texts. More than 1.5 million pages from their remarkable collections have been made freely available online to researchers and to the general public.

The digitization project has focussed on three main groups of texts: Hebrew manuscripts, Greek manuscripts, and incunabula, or 15th-century printed books. These groups were chosen for their scholarly importance and for the strength of their collections in both libraries, and they include both religious and secular texts. An important group of Latin texts in the Vatican Library has also been made available online.

Through the Polonsky Foundation Digitization Project website, users can access all the digitized items and browse consolidated lists of digitized items by subject, date, and place of origin.