The Dead Sea Scrolls will go online in a project launched by the Israel Antiquities Authority.
The project, part of the celebrations for the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the authority, will image and digitize the entire collection of 900 manuscripts comprising about 30,000 Dead Sea Scrolls fragments.
The Antiquities Authority is collaborating with the Google R&D center in Israel to upload the digitized Scrolls images, as well as additional data that will allow users to perform searches across a broad range of data in a number of languages and formats.
The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library project is being funded with a major gift from the Leon Levy Foundation, with additional major funding from the Arcadia Foundation and the Yad Hanadiv Foundation.
It is the first time that the collection of Scrolls will be photographed in its entirety since the 1950s.
The images will be equal in quality to the actual viewing of the Scrolls, according to the Antiquities Authority.
“We are establishing a milestone connection between progress and the past to preserve this unique heritage for future generations,” said Shuka Dorfman, director of the Israel Antiquities Authority. “At the end of a comprehensive and profound examination, we have succeeded in recruiting the best minds and technological means to preserve this unrivaled cultural heritage treasure which belongs to all of us, so that the public with a click of the mouse will be able to freely access history in its fullest glamour.”
