They keep people out of their archives because things are fragile and poorly organized. Don't underestimate how difficult (and expensive!) it is to keep these documents preserved. I've had pages fall apart in my hands and the document was only from 1714. I was taking proper precautions, too. And, I should note, the documents were adequately preserved according to the standards of the time. The Vatican only wants to let in people who have a good reason for being in there. Fishing expeditions-- especially by independent researchers-- are not permitted, because they can damage the documents. That creates a weird chicken and egg scenario, because it makes it very difficult to find new topics to explore. Also, it means that you won't be allowed to use the archives unless you're certain that 1. the documents are there and 2. they are instrumental to the topic at hand.
Digitizing the documents will change all of that. It's a lot less error-prone and destructive than creating microfiche and it yields quite a bit of other benefits, like indexing. No one, least of all the Vatican archivists, have a complete picture of the contents of the library. Once they have those scans they'll want to release them because it will help us understand a great deal about Christianity and post-Roman Europe. The only limitations I can see are those that other libraries have put in, such as forcing researchers to view the documents in the browser, as opposed to downloading them. That's what Oxford did with their collection of ballads (whether they still do I don't know). That's annoying, but they reasoned that it would keep people from taxing their servers by downloading the entire collection wholesale.
And I'm not sure what you mean by referring to trained archivists as being dismissed as some sort of backwards tribe. A great many history programs have archival (i.e. "library science) programs and training for their PhDs.
Digitizing the documents will change all of that. It's a lot less error-prone and destructive than creating microfiche and it yields quite a bit of other benefits, like indexing. No one, least of all the Vatican archivists, have a complete picture of the contents of the library. Once they have those scans they'll want to release them because it will help us understand a great deal about Christianity and post-Roman Europe. The only limitations I can see are those that other libraries have put in, such as forcing researchers to view the documents in the browser, as opposed to downloading them. That's what Oxford did with their collection of ballads (whether they still do I don't know). That's annoying, but they reasoned that it would keep people from taxing their servers by downloading the entire collection wholesale.
And I'm not sure what you mean by referring to trained archivists as being dismissed as some sort of backwards tribe. A great many history programs have archival (i.e. "library science) programs and training for their PhDs.