First, some background:
IWitness is an educational website [free access] developed by USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education that provides access to more than 1,500 full life histories, testimonies of survivors and witnesses to the Holocaust and other genocides for guided exploration.
Now, news of a new resource added to iWitness.
From the USC Shoah Foundation:
IWitness users looking for secondary source material can now use keywords to search The Holocaust and Other Genocides: An Introduction, the first digital book to be integrated into the IWitness platform.
An incisive guide to five 20th century genocides (including the Holocaust, Rwandan, Cambodian and Armenian Genocides and the Crisis and Genocide in Yugoslavia) and their ramifications, The Holocaust and Other Genocides is published by the Netherlands-based NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, a partner of the USC Shoah Foundation.
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IWitness has long enabled keyword search results not only from USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive, but from the websites of partners Yad Vashem, Genocide Archive Rwanda and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum as well. Adding a book to the mix was a technological challenge.
“The search results from Yad Vashem and USHMM involve linking website to website, which is relatively simple,” says Mills Chang, USC Shoah Foundation Information Technology Services’ senior software architect. “To add a book is more complicated. We had to figure out how to take the book apart page by page and work it into our existing search structure.” It took the ITS team six months to incorporate The Holocaust and Other Genocides into IWitness.
It was time well spent. Search results take IWitness users right to the specific pages where their keywords can be found and also enables searching of maps, photographs and artifacts. Wherever their search takes them, they can use it as a jumping off point for further learning: Since the system allows for browsing, it promotes discovery as readily as it helps users narrowly home in on what they are looking for.
Direct to IWitness Database
NOTE: The full text of the book, The Holocaust and Other Genocides: An Introduction, is also available (free) as a single PDF file or by chapter direct from the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam.
This guidebook offers concise information about five 20th-century cases of genocide and the response of international justice. Based on the most recent literature Holocaust and other genocides is an indispensable work offering new insight in the processes of genocide.
Chapters
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