Source: Fast Company Technology Newsletter
Neil Ungerleider writes in Fast Company's Technology Newsletter: "Although replicas of the Dead Sea Scrolls in various formats and levels of completeness have been circulating for a while, full images of the scrolls will arrive on the Internet in about a year, thanks to a three-way agreement between Google, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) and the Israel Museum. According to the IAA, the Museum's entire collection of approximately 30,000 Scroll fragments will be digitized as high-resolution images and made freely available via Google. It will be the first time the Dead Sea Scrolls have been photographed in full since the 1950s.
Work on the project will be conducted by Google's Israel Research and Development Center, using imaging technology developed by American firm MegaVision. Although the exact specifics of the digital imaging system were not made available, each Scroll fragment will be imaged in various wavelengths at “the highest resolution possible” and, according to the IAA, at equal image quality to the original. Google Israel will then make the Scrolls searchable in multiple languages, with a metadata setup that includes transcriptions, translations and bibliography."