Dead Sea Scrolls to Go Online

Dead Sea Temple Scroll presented in a major new exhibition of Jewish art and artifacts in Berlin in 2005.

Fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

A conservation worker of the Israeli Antiquities department cleans some of the 2000-year-old fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls at a laboratory in Jerusalem on January 27, 2010. The goal is to ensure the ancient manuscripts, found half a century ago on the shores of the Dead Sea, are exhibited in ideal conditions and to restore the tens of thousands of fragments that suffered not only from the ravages of time but also from past conservation efforts.

An Israeli researcher takes digital images of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls at an Israeli Antiquities Authority laboratory in Jerusalem. The IAA announced it had launched a pilot program to make three-stage digital images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the most ancient Hebrew record of the Old Testament that has been found to date. Each of all of the thousands of Dead Sea Scrolls fragments belonging to about 900 manuscripts will be photographed in color to record their current status, by a high resolution single wavelength infrared imager to help enhance the often illegible text, and by a spectral imager to monitor any changes in the fragments. The IAA said they would place the images in an internet data bank that will be available to the public.

Israeli researchers take digital images of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls at a laboratory in Jerusalem.

A two thousand-year-old fragment of the The Words of the Luminaries from the Dead Sea Scrolls is seen on display at The Jewish Museum September 17, 2008 in New York City.

A combination of two handout photos provided by the Israeli Antiquities Authority shows a color digital image (top) of a fragment of the Dead Sea Scrolls at an IAA laboratory in Jerusalem, and the same fragment as seen by a high resolution single wavelength infrared imager. The IAA announced it had launched a pilot program to make three-stage digital images of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Remains of the west wing of the main building at Qumran.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel looks at the Dead Sea Scrolls during a visit to the Israel Museum in on March 18, 2008 in Jerusalem.

The caves in which the scrolls were found by a Beduin shepherd.

Archeologist Kim Bowes from Princeton University displays pottery shards found at a dig near the Dead Sea which some researchers say may have been the site of a village of the ancient Essenes sect. The excavation at Ein Gedi comprised 22 stone buildings dating back to the 1st century AD. The only previous known Essene village was discovered 50 years earlier, 40 kilometers away at Qumran, where the the Dead Sea scrolls were found.

The Shrine of the Book, a wing of the Israel Museum near Givat Ram in Jerusalem, housing the Dead Sea Scrolls. The Israel Museum was founded in 1965 as Israel's national museum.