Google And Israel Museum Provide Digital Dead Sea Scroll Access

By Cornelius Nunev


The Dead Sea Scrolls are among the best-known and most important historical documents discovered in generations. The ancient files are mostly housed in museums in the Middle East. The files are fragile and several are damaged. Because of this, the museum has restricted access to the documents, a move that has been controversial. Now the Israel Museum has partnered with Google to offer electronic access to the documents.

Getting the Dead Sea Scrolls online

The Dead Sea Scrolls digitization job has been ongoing for the past few years. To be able to photograph the files at 1,200 megapixels in the environment that will shield the documents from deteriorating, a brand new camera was developed. Each scroll and fragment is being carefully photographed, then gathered and placed online in a searchable database. The primary goal is to give access to the scrolls to as many people as possible. It will not be long before the scrolls can be accessed. In a few more years, or in 2016, they'll be accessible.

Israel Museum works with Google

The Dead Sea Scrolls digitization job is something Google will spend a lot of time with. All scroll photos are located in a database on Google Storage. The Google Apps engine is what runs the site. The pages are all searchable, transcribed and indexed for search results. That is one thing the Google team has been working on. This is not something very different from what Google has done in the past. It is just like Google's Art Job, Prado Museum and holocaust photo collection.

Letting remarks be allowed on scrolls

The digitized versions of the Dead Sea Scrolls allow for something very unusual - direct remarks. The Dead Sea Scroll sections can have comments posted to them by viewers. Over time, researchers are going to be keeping an eye on what amateur scientists find in the scrolls as potential further areas for research. To be able to determine a ton of scroll document fragments and pieces, this may be very helpful. Google has said it will support digitize those fragments for anyone who wants them to be made accessible for anyone else who has pieces since the Israel Museum doesn't have them all.




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