Introduction Digital technologies are successfully applied in cultural heritage projects supporting digitization of cultural objects, metadata creation, metadata maintenance, creation of digital infrastructure for cultural heritage research and many others. When we discuss archival digital textual content, some of the most imminent tasks are related to automatic metadata generation, searchability and preservation and these can Read More
Category: Digital Methods
The Learning Curve in Sharing Data with the EHRI Project: The Example of a Memorial Site, Kazerne Dossin, Mechelen
Kazerne Dossin – Memorial, Museum and Documentation Centre on Holocaust and Human Rights opened its doors on 1st December 2012. The institute inherited its archival collections from its predecessor, the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance (JMDR). The JMDR had been inaugurated in 1995 at the former SS-Sammellager Mecheln, better known as the Dossin barracks, Read More
Person Records Linking in the USHMM Survivors and Victims Database
Archivists, historians and relatives of people who’ve been involved in the Holocaust all struggle with the same problem when exploring the vast sea of data related to that epoch – they are not able to obtain all documents related to a given person. There could be several reasons for that – the documents are spread Read More
quod: A Tool for Querying and Organising Digitised Historical Documents
In this blog post we introduce a prototype tool for OCRing and querying digitised historical documents, quod, which can be used for organising large collections of such documents.The work described represents a proof of concept, where the feasibility of the idea is demonstrated. Background The archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) in Bad Arolsen, Read More
Using Wikidata to build an authority list of Holocaust-era ghettos
Introduction In the spring of 2017, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI, work package 11) began a pilot project to link the EHRI ghettos vocabulary set with Wikidata. One of the primary objectives of work package 11 is to build an authoritative vocabulary of ghettos that can be used to describe the diverse Holocaust-related archival Read More
Engaging the Crowd with Holocaust Oral Testimonies
With over 22,000 hours of audio and video testimony in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collection and available online, we face a search and discoverability problem. Visitors to the collection can only find certain interviews by sheer luck or by looking for a certain person’s name. Creating catalog information for the hours of testimony Read More
Welcome to the Document Blog of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure
Making digital collections and archival material can be full of challenges. As more and more material becomes accessible online, it also means that archivists and historians have to think up new ways to help users get the most out of the information each document offers and to place that document into its complex historical context. Read More
