THE CODEX SINAITICUS CONSERVATION PROJECT is covered in a long Reuters India article. The discussion of Sinaiticus looks pretty accurate, although it's debatable whether it was one of Constantine's fifty manuscripts.

FEATURE - Monks use hi-tech camera to read ancient manuscripts
Sun Jun 19, 2005 12:54 AM ET

By Tom Perry

MOUNT SINAI, Egypt (Reuters) - The world's oldest monastery plans to use hi-tech cameras to shed new light on ancient Christian texts preserved for centuries within its fortress walls in the Sinai Desert.

Saint Catherine's Monastery hopes the technology will allow a fuller understanding of some of the world's earliest Christian texts, including pages from the Codex Sinaiticus -- the oldest surviving bible in the world.

The technique, known as hyperspectral imaging, will use a camera to photograph the parchments at different wavelengths of light, highlighting faded texts obscured by time and later overwritings.

[...]

Here are some other interesting details about the use of the same technology on other manuscripts at St. Catherine's:

Hyperspectral imaging will be used to read another of the monastery's most significant manuscripts -- the Codex Syriacus.

The technology should allow scholars to read the faint remnants of a washed-out 5th-century text which lie underneath visible 8th-century writing. The underlying text in Syriac is a copy of a 2nd-century translation of the New Testament gospels.

The technical name for a manuscript with two layers of writing on it is"palimpsest."

In the late 19th century, scholars applied chemicals to the manuscript which briefly made the underlying text visible but made the parchment more brittle. "It's almost certain that the whole text has not been extracted yet," Pickwoad said.

Photographing the rippled parchment may involve using up to "four cameras taking images from different angles and then knitting the image together, electronically pulling it flat because we may not be able to pull it flat physically," he said.

The technology could also be applied to read the faint traces of a script in a language only ever seen before carved in a few stone inscriptions. It lies in the pages of a Georgian manuscript dating to the 8th or 9th century.

[...]

The monastery aims to have 100 manuscripts photographed and accessible through a Web site by mid-2006. "Even though it's only 100 out of 3,000, it will be an important scholarly resource," he [monastery librarian Father Justin] said.

Book historians are currently cataloguing the condition of the manuscripts and the physical features of their bindings, 50 percent of which are original.

"The evidence of where a manuscript has been and where it has come from to get here is often in the binding," [book historian Nicholas] Pickwoad said.

Conservators are even keeping the dust they brush from the manuscripts for traces of pollen or seeds which may yield evidence on how texts in languages including Persian, Amharic and Hebrew made it to the middle of the Sinai Desert.

I wasn't aware that the project involved so many manuscripts.