The Mountain View, Calif.-based tech giant helped the Israel Museum use ultra high-resolution imaging technology to make digital copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and then load them to the museum's enhanced site. It also optimized the content so that users searching for text from the Scrolls will be directed to the museum site.
The Scrolls, roughly 2,400 years old but only re-discovered in 1947, include the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence. They offer insights into life and religion in ancient Jerusalem.
In the first four days of being online, the digital Scrolls were viewed by a million visitors, or approximately the same number of visitors the physical museum records in a whole year.
"This is taking the material to an amazing range of audiences," said James S. Snyder, the museum's director, to the New York Times. "There's no way we would have had the technical capability to do this on our own."
Bringing the Scrolls online was the first of two pilot projects that launched the Google Cultural Institute, with another effort bringing online the photos and documents of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. The Paris-based institute incorporates the Google Art Project, which uses Google Street View technology to allow digital views of the art and layouts of 17 leading museums around the world, including New York's Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery in London and the Gemaeldegalerie in Berlin.
It also follows efforts by various museums to make better use of mobile technologies, and especially social media, by creating sophisticated apps that serve as guides through their collections.
Other forthcoming Google Cultural Institute projects include developing online galleries for France's Palace of Versailles and South Africa's Nelson Mandela Foundation. The institute also plans to create a standard set of tools that any cultural institution could use to digitize its collection on its own.
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