Strata: Dead Sea Scrolls Go Digital

Want to browse through the Temple Scroll on your laptop while drinking your morning coffee? Or maybe check out the War Scroll on your iPad on the train to work? No problem ... just go to Google.

Using the latest high-resolution photography and imaging techniques, Google and the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) have joined forces in a project to digitize the more than 30,000 Dead Sea Scroll fragments in the IAA’s collection. In the coming months, Google will begin making these new, high-quality images of the scrolls available online, where they can be viewed, searched, scrutinized and studied by anyone in the world at anytime—all for free and with no strings attached.

The monumental, $3.5-million project will provide everyone from scroll scholars to BAR readers with unfettered access to the documents, which formerly could be seen only in museum collections, restricted photographic archives or as photographs in massive scholarly tomes that only libraries and research institutions could afford. The digitization project will also incorporate an array of secondary information, including scroll transcriptions, translations and bibliographies, thereby allowing users to perform any number of searches related to the reading and study of the scrolls.