Digital Humanities: How Everyone Can Get a Library Card to the World’s Most Exclusive Collections Online

from http://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/archaeology-today/cultural-heritage/digital-humanities/?mqsc=E3773539&utm_source=WhatCountsEmail&utm_medium=BHD+Week%20in%20Review%20Newsletter&utm_campaign=E4B531

Diane H. Cline   •  05/19/2014

What would happen if the Pope’s library were accidentally burnt? Or what if the Dead Sea Scrolls were damaged in some way? That’s why the Huntington Library in Pasadena had a set of microfiches of the Dead Sea Scrolls—just in case. Today digitization and the Internet make microfiches obsolete. Digitization, or the scanning of each page of these documents and books, is a way to preserve our knowledge for the future.

In 2003, Jewish Iraqi manuscripts were discovered in a flooded basement in Baghdad. Seen here is an early effort to dry the books and documents. The collection has been digitized and can be viewed at http://www.ija.archives.gov/. Photo: Harold Rhode, courtesy U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

Something similar actually did happen in Iraq in 2003. Soon after the beginning of the Iraq War, soldiers in Baghdad stumbled upon a treasury of Jewish Iraqi manuscripts in a flooded basement. The collection consisted of 2,700 books and tens of thousands of documents chronicling the 2,500-year-old Jewish community. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration restored the physical documents, digitized the pages and published them online with little fanfare. A curated exhibit of the physical objects was shown in New York at the Museum of Jewish Heritage between February 4 and May 18, 2014.

But preserving the texts is only part of the picture. Making these texts accessible is another part. Can you imagine being allowed to browse for as long as you want in the Pope’s personal library? The Vatican Apostolic Library, founded in 1451, houses some 82,000 manuscripts and books and is considered one of the world’s most important collections for Biblical studies and the history of religion. Last year, the Vatican agreed to let a Japanese firm, NTT Data, scan every single page—that’s called digitizing the collection—and the Japanese are paying for the work to be done, for a rumored cost of $20,000,000. Later this year the first 3,000 documents should become available to the public: an online collection of Medieval and Renaissance illuminated texts by Greek and Latin authors. And how many pages do you think they will have to scan—very carefully—to digitize all 82,000 manuscripts? 30 million pages!

This is the other miracle of digitization. In the past, even as recently as a few years ago, only one person at a time could look at a manuscript or papyrus, and only if one had the money to travel and the right credentials to show at the archive or museum. Today, however, anyone anywhere with Internet access can browse these parts of humanity’s cultural heritage. For example, the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA) recently announced the expansion of its website to allow visitors to the Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library to search images of the texts online. As they say on their website, “Using the most advanced and innovative imaging technology, each Scroll fragment is imaged in various wavelengths and in the highest resolution possible, then uploaded to the Digital Library. For the first time ever, the Dead Sea Scrolls archive is becoming available to the public online.”

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