Google And Israel Museum Provide Digital Dead Sea Scroll Access

By Cornelius Nunev


In terms of old texts, the Dead Sea Scrolls are considered one of probably the most important old texts found in the last couple of generations. The files are fragile and several are damaged. Because of this, the museum has restricted admittance to the files, a move that has been debatable. Now, worldwide access to the documents is being provided online. The Israel Museum and Google have partnered to provide the admittance to these files.

Dead Sea Scrolls digitization project

In the last few years, the Dead Sea Scrolls digitization job has been going on. There was development of a brand new camera. This was done so that the photos will not be deteriorated with a special environment while also taking pictures at 1,200 megapixels. There will be photos taken of each scroll and fragment. Then, these pictures will be put in a searchable database after being gathered. The idea is to offer access to the scrolls to as large an audience as possible. By 2016, all scrolls will, in theory, be available for reading.

Asking Google to work with the Israel Museum on the job

Google is spending time working on the job. The Dead Sea Scrolls digitization project has had lots of help. All scroll photos are located in a database on Google Storage. The Google Apps engine is what runs the website. The pages are all searchable, transcribed and indexed for search outcomes. That is one thing the Google team has been working on. This is just like Google's Art Project, Prado Museum and holocaust photo collection.

Direct commentary

Direct commentary is allowed on the digitized version of the Dead Sea Scrolls which is very unusual. Viewers will be allowed to comment on the specific sections of the Dead Sea Scrolls. To be able to look at more things in depth that might be important, researchers will check out what researchers are finding in the scrolls. This is something researchers will really appreciate. This is especially true when looking at the thousands of scroll document fragments and pieces that need to be deciphered. Google has said it will support digitize those fragments for everyone who wants them to be made available for anyone else who has pieces since the Israel Museum does not have them all.




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