For much of the time since their discovery in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were the jealously guarded treasure of a select group of scholars. Now, thanks to a partnership between Google and the Israel Museum,
five scrolls have been digitized and made available online.
posted by Horace Rumpole
on Sep 26, 2011 -
25 comments
The Koran of Kansuh al-Ghuri is a 500 year old manuscript written on six foot square sheets of a silken, vellum-like fabric which is polished with smooth stones so that ink sits on the surface rather than being absorbed. It is considered "one of the finest, most
lavishly illuminated and calligraphically significant Qur’an manuscripts from the late
Mamluk period". Too fragile to be displayed, it is also missing two leaves that were discovered in Dublin's Chester Beatty Library in the 1970s. So a unified digitized edition is being prepared that will be freely available on the Internet for researchers. The process is being blogged
here.
posted by Joe Beese
on Jan 24, 2011 -
14 comments
Docs Teach, a new website from the
National Archives, offers teachers access to more than 3,000 digitized documents from NARA's collections, along with classroom activities using them. It's the latest in a series of efforts under the recently appointed Archivist of the United States
David Ferriero to enhance the agency's presence on the web.
(via) [more inside]
posted by Horace Rumpole
on Sep 28, 2010 -
5 comments
Circuits are flipping on in the
nation's attic. A couple of weeks ago,
31 "digerati" -- like
Clay Shirky,
Chris Anderson, and
George Oates --
dropped in to the Smithsonian Institution for the invitation-only conference
"Smithsonian 2.0: A Gathering to Re-imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age".
Dan Cohen of the
Center for History and New Media provides
a great summary (and continues to pose provocative questions) on his own blog. Those whose invitations were somehow lost in the mail can play fly-on-the-wall by
watching the keynotes, paging through the
Flickr pool of envymaking glimpses of their behind-the-scenes lab and collections tours, reading the
blog (where Bruce Wyman of the Denver Art Museum lays out
a succinct road map for museums using social media), and poking around in the SI's
website gallery. Want to cheer on the USA's favorite 163-year-old
"Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge" without taking the trip to DC? Thanks to their recent efforts, you can now follow the SI on
Twitter, listen to its
podcasts, watch its
YouTube channel, visit the
Latino Virtual Museum in Second Life, or use the
FaceBook gifts page to send your best friends their very own pair of Dorothy's
ruby slippers,
Hope diamond,
Negro Leagues baseball, or
coelocanth.
posted by Miko
on Feb 27, 2009 -
13 comments
Fire destroyed the office of the War Department and all its files in 1800, and for decades historians believed that the collection, and the window it provided into the workings of the early federal government, was lost forever. Thanks to a decade-long effort to retrieve copies of the files scattered in archives across the country, the collection has been reconstituted and is offered here as a
fully-searchable digital database.
posted by Knappster
on Jan 13, 2009 -
10 comments
The Open Content Alliance poses a threat to Google and Microsoft's competing library digitization projects. OCA was founded by the
Internet Archive, whose main claim to fame is the Wayback Machine, designed to archive the internet's web history. OCA's mission is to open the nation's library collections to universal web search by digitizing books and making them as widely accessible as possible.
[more inside]
posted by richards1052
on Oct 22, 2007 -
9 comments
Apparently, the digitization of all words ever spoken by human beings would take up 5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. Or, 5
exabytes. How long will it be before
my laptop has that much space?
posted by sandor
on Feb 23, 2000 -
3 comments
