Expanding Our Digital Reach through Collaboration

To raise further awareness of JDC’s archival resources among diverse research communities, the JDC Archives is entering into exciting partnerships with other institutions and digital projects around the world to increase the discoverability of its holdings and to encourage ongoing scholarship using JDC Archives records. These projects will continue to increase the accessibility of JDC’s rich archival collections.

These projects include:

• Europeana: Judaica Europeana, a project that gathers digital content to the Europeana portal, coordinates with cultural institutions “to provide integrated access to digital collections which document the Jewish presence and heritage in Europe.” As the culmination of a two-year effort to prepare our collections for the portal, the JDC Archives provided Judaica Europeana with file-level data from its earliest records, the historically rich 1914-1918 collection.  When users searching the Europeana portal find a JDC Archives file of interest, the link leads back to the file on the JDC Archives website and to the documents within it. Not only does this bring traffic to our site, but it also connects users to JDC archival resources beyond the 1914-1918 collection. Search Europeana.
• EHRI: The European Holocaust Research Initiative is dedicated to making Holocaust-era sources available in one place through its online portal. The EHRI portal includes key information about all JDC Archives Holocaust-era collections, among them the Cyprus, Geneva, Istanbul, New York, Stockholm, and Warsaw collections. The JDC Archives is one of EHRI’s cooperating institutions, joining other repositories such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the State Archives of Belgium, the Hungarian Jewish Archives, and Yad Vashem. The EHRI portal officially launched on March 26 in Berlin at an event attended by JDC Archives’ Digitization Project Manager, Jeffrey Edelstein. Search EHRI.

The JDC Archives is currently pursuing additional collaborations with:

• CENDARI: CENDARI (the Collaborative European Digital Archival Infrastructure), a collaborative initiative that brings together digital resources on the medieval and World War I eras, has requested to include our WWI-era collections (1914-1918 and 1919-1921) in its portal.
• Beit Hatfutsot: Beit Hatfutsot, the “Museum of the Jewish People” based in Tel-Aviv, is interested in incorporating results from the JDC Archives Names Index into a new online search feature it is creating based on its genealogical database of family trees.
• DLoC: DLoC, the Digital Library of the Caribbean, is a cooperative digital library for primary source records about the Caribbean and its neighboring territories.  The project is administered by Florida International University in partnership with the University of the Virgin Islands and the University of Florida. The JDC Archives plans to share its DORSA collection, which documents JDC’s establishment in 1938 of the Dominican Republic Settlement Association, an agricultural settlement for over 700 Austrian and German Jewish refugees in Sosúa in the north of the Dominican Republic.