An army of Scrolls scholars?

AN ARMY OF SCROLLS SCHOLARS? That's Melissa Bell's take in the Washington Post:

Google’s Dead Sea Scrolls is latest crowdsourcing project

[...]

For the religious scholar, seeing the fragile animal skin written on between the third and first centuries BCE now known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, would have required a trip to Jerusalem until the scrolls went online last month as a project between Google and the Israel Museum.

While Google touts these projects as part of its mission to make all the world’s information available online, the scrolls’ existence in digital form serves a secondary purpose: allowing amateur detectives to seek clues that elude scholarly academics.

The posting of the scrolls for the masses is the latest example of academic crowdsourcing, inviting the usually anonymous community of people online to contribute know-how, money or work to a given project. And scientists, journalists and academics have begun to recognize the value in that crowdsourced knowledge, turning to the community to unlock some of the most persistent mysteries of the world.

[...]

And what will the masses contribute to unlocking the secrets of the nearly 1,000 Dead Sea Scrolls? That may just be a question for the ages.

Maybe. Original work on the Scrolls requires some very specialized training, and I'm not aware of any initiatives that have broken down Scrolls-related problems into easily crowdsourced formats (as with the AIDS and NASA projects mentioned in the article). But we'll see what happens with Google's Digital Dead Sea Scrolls project (background here) and also the recent Ancient Lives project on the Oxyrhynchus Papyri.