This is one of the most wonderful things currently happening! It's actually been going on for years, and this is a new and improved method for use in the work of reading the Herculaneum scrolls, not the very beginning of the work.

Some of the scrolls have already been opened by an older method (a machine slowly unrolling) that does some damage the scroll and also has consequences for the ink. It wasn't a perfect method, since there were often limits to what text was recoverable. Not all of the Villa dei Papiri has been excavated, so there are likely still many scrolls waiting to be excavated, as well as many that haven't yet been touched.

Because of the work already done, we know that there are many scrolls written by Philodemus, an Epicurean philosopher and poet whose work was all but unknown before the Herculaneum texts. Philodemus was a very influential person in his own day and for the immediately succeeding generations (including such luminaries as Vergil). The "Philodemus Project" has been around for several years already, working on reconstructing and publishing texts by the author.

It's also important to bear in mind that these are texts from the 1st century CE or earlier (I mean, the physical scrolls were produced then). The classical texts that we have now have been painstakingly edited from multiple varying manuscripts (having been copied and recopied for centuries, errors have crept into the surviving copies). For Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example, there are fragments from around the 9th and 10th centuries, but larger surviving texts from no earlier than the 11th - nearly a thousand years after he wrote. The Herculaneum texts are from no later than 79 AD - imagine how much stronger the manuscript tradition will be for those texts!

So, to start with before even really beginning to read the remaining scrolls, we're talking about:

• definitely expanding our knowledge of an important literary and intellectual figure (Philodemus)

• perhaps discovering totally new texts, with what seems to be a bit of an emphasis on poetry and philosophy (from what we can tell of what's already been worked on)

• a strong manuscript tradition for all the Herculaneum texts - whether these are new to us or improving currently known texts (giving us confidence that we're reading what the author wrote, with few or no emendations, glosses, editing etc. by later copyists).

By the way, Pompeii is a different city that was overwhelmed by the eruption. Herculaneum, where the library was found, is a separate town.