Google art project

I just discovered that Google is sponsoring a really cool digitization project -- several museums (including the National Gallery and the MoMA) have allowed them to digitize some of their paintings at extremely high resolutions. You can zoom in pretty much as far as you would probably want to and study the painting closer than you could in person. I tried it out with Van Gogh's Starry Night, and it's really neat. I'm curious to learn how they go about doing this -- do they take a picture of the painting and go from there?