The Apple Advantage

Profiles in Success: Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The new team was able to work far more quickly and efficiently under Professor Tov’s leadership and with the new technology platform. Twenty nine more volumes of the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series have now been published in 16 years, effectively completing the official publication project.

Thanks to the technology, members of the team were able to work independently of each other, producing “camera-ready” files with commentaries, images and extensive notes. These could then be quality controlled by Professor Tov’s editorial group in Jerusalem before being despatched to the external publisher. The publisher received the camera-ready pages and reproduced them without alteration. This worldwide desktop publishing approach was a major benefit to the project, both in speeding up the process, and giving the academic team significant control over presentation of the volumes.

“This was real Mac ease-of-use, which meant each scholar could easily compose the pages and put the texts where he or she wanted them”, says Professor Tov. “With Mac, what you see on the screen is what you get on the page”.

The team was also impressed by the Mac’s indexing capabilities. “Concordance — contextualising words — was a very important part of the whole project. The Mac indexing was a key factor in how quickly we were able to work”.

As for the team’s acceptance of the Mac platform, Professor Tov says he received only positive responses from the academics, many of whom were long term PC users. “We heard about no viruses on the Macs, and of course that is a common problem with PCs, and no computer crashes”.

“My whole Mac operation was really super”, concludes Professor Tov. “I still find it simply amazing we can create these pages to look so good, with the technology actually aiding our research, and then we can send a file of 90 pages across the ocean and it arrives looking beautiful!”

The team is staying together for a further six months, working on re-editions of some volumes. The scrolls described in the Discoveries in the Judean Desert volumes will now have their inner meanings researched and investigated over time.