If ever there were a time to follow the best practices for document digitization, this is it: Researchers in Israel are working to put fragile fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls on the Internet, according to The New York Times.
The famed scrolls, which contain the first known versions of books from the Hebrew Bible, represent a unique conservation challenge. They comprise about 900 documents, pieced together from a grand total of 15,000 smaller fragments. And the writing on the scrolls has already deteriorated — because 2,000-year-old ink is far from fade-resistant, and because the Scotch tape added by scholars in the 1950s didn’t exactly help matters.
The digitization project should help the Israel Antiquities Authority, which oversees the scrolls, improve access to the documents without exposing them to light, heat, and other threats. But it will take one or two years to get the scrolls online: A team of scholars, including faculty members from Kings College London and the University of Haifa, has to photograph every surviving piece of the scrolls in both color and infrared. —Brock Read
