Just after I finished writing the post about Princeton’s new policy of making all scholarly papers available to the public, I came across a story at the BBC News site, which reports that Google has worked together with the Israel Museum in Jerusalem to put facsimiles of some of the Dead Sea Scrolls online. The Scrolls, originally discovered at Qumran on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, preserve the oldest existing copies of some parts of the Hebrew Bible, as well as some other texts. The scrolls that have been made available so far include:
- The Temple Scroll
- The Great Isaiah Scroll
- The War Scroll
- The Community Rule Scroll
- The Commentary of Habakkuk Scroll
The online edition contains very high resolution images of the scrolls (1200 megapixel), so that users can inspect the text in detail. Additional scrolls may be added in the future. More details are available on the museum site.
This is another aspect of Google’s project to make more of the world’s cultural heritage available online. I’ve written before about the Google Art project, and about some of the work done on the Google Books project. It’s good to see some of the positive potential of the Web realized.
The Official Google Blog also has a post on this project.
Random Walks 