U.S. Holocuast Museum & Ancestry.com Announce Launch of Project to Create World's Largest Online Resource About Victims of Holocaust and Nazi Persocution

Note: Two other recent Holocaust projects are linked at the bottom of this post. Btw, this is yet another example of a resource that will be built with the help of crowdsourcing.

From a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Announcement:

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ancestry.com today announced the launch of the World Memory Project, www.WorldMemoryProject.org, which will recruit the public to help to build the world’s largest online resource for information on Jewish victims of the Holocaust and millions of non-Jews who were targeted for persecution by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. The project will dramatically expand the number of Museum documents relating to individual victims that can be searched online.

[Clip]
The Museum’s archives contain information on well over 17 million people targeted by Nazi racial and political policies, including Jews, Poles, Roma, Ukrainians, political prisoners, and many others. The Museum assists thousands of people worldwide every year that are searching for information about individuals in its collections. The World Memory Project will greatly expand the accessibility of the Museum’s archival collection and enable millions of people to search for their own answers online.

[Clip]

The World Memory Project will utilize proprietary software and project management donated by Ancestry.com, which hosts its own online archival project to expand its transcribed records collections. Once transcribed, the indices will be hosted exclusively on Ancestry.com and permanently free to search. The Museum will also provide copies of documents to survivors and their families at no cost. The original documentation will remain in the Museum’s archival collection.

Individuals from anywhere in the world can help in this unique effort to make collections from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum available online by visiting www.worldmemoryproject.org and registering to become a contributor. Since a beta launch in February 2011, Ancestry.com contributors have already indexed over 30,000 Museum archival documents that will soon be searchable at no cost by users around the globe. This figure will multiply as more people participate in the project.

Read the Complete News Release (incl. comments from Sara J. Bloomfield, Director, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Learn More About Becoming a Contributor
Note: The software required is PC only. It will run with VMWare but we do hope that actual Mac software becomes available.

Two Other Recently Announced Holocaust Projects/Resources:

+ New Online Digital Archive: “JDC Releases Over 500,000 Searchable Holocaust-Era Names And Historic Photo Collections”
Posted on infoDocket yesterday.

+ “Yad Vashem and Google partner to preserve and share Holocaust archives”
From January 26, 2011

See Also: “Holocaust Museum Teams with Ancestry.com to Build Largest Online Archive on Victims of Nazis” (via AP, Washington Post)

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Digital Collections, Digital Preservation, Management and Leadership, News, Patrons and Users