As to ancient manuscripts, the scale, technical sophistication, and benefits of the current effort are far beyond anything we have seen before. Better preservation of artifacts is all for the good, but it is the recovery of otherwise lost ancient literature that uniquely offers a “Second Renaissance.”
And I say again, that that is simply not true. There is no gigantic difference between techniques used forty years ago and those used today. They are simply faster, cheaper, and more widely applied. My major professor was good friends with an English scientist who moonlighted from his day job as a spectroscopist at a major instrument company to collaborate with the Metropolitan Museum of Art doing exactly this kind of stuff. He did fascinating slide shows of "hidden" versions of painted-over artwork revealed by non-destructive methods of analysis (in those days, done by neutron activation analysis).