Digital recording of St Catherine's papyri

http://tinyurl.com/39jjbj (calendarlive.com)
"St. Catherine's is entering the Age of Technology — with the help of Father Justin Sinaites, a 57-year-old American monk from El Paso, and Hemeid, the 23-year-old son of a Bedouin camel driver. They are implementing a digital photography project that will make high-resolution images of the library's closely guarded manuscripts available to scholars all over the world.
Consisting of 3,300 manuscripts in 11 languages — many of them richly illuminated in gold leaf and bright, jewel-like colors — the library's collection is second in number and importance only to the trove at the Vatican. With manuscripts made as early as the 6th century, the Sinai cache consists mainly of scriptures, sermons and texts for religious services, but it includes classical Greek literature and a few medical texts with herbal remedies for various afflictions.
Today the object awaiting its close-up is a rare Arabic manuscript of Christian gospels, written on parchment in 897. A vacuum hose attached to the cradle gently pulls back the open page. A narrow piece of bone placed on the front of the page, near the binding, helps to flatten the rumpled parchment.
Hemeid scrutinizes a video preview of the page on the computer screen, centers the image, adjusts the focus and clicks the mouse. The flash units, covered with diffusers to remove harmful ultraviolet light, pop four times as the camera takes four pictures, each in a slightly different position. Hemeid clicks a command that enables the computer to merge the four exposures into a single high-resolution digital photograph."
See the above page for the full story.

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