Bringing the archive to the people

Searching for names and indexing its collections accordingly was especially important to the ITS. This is essential to many researchers as well. But today’s users are also interested in other search criteria for finding information in the relevant documents. Improved indexing helps the employees in the Tracing department, too, because it allows them to carry out research more quickly. In this way, the ITS can improve its service and reduce waiting times.

For faster indexing, the ITS is testing automated text recognition systems from three providers on several of its collections. Modern programs have major benefits, particularly when it comes to very diverse collections: they can identify not only letters but also graphical patterns. This means they can sort collections by document type and enable the archive employees to find specific letters, prisoner cards or lists of names and to form new collections or sub-series. They can even find all of the letters from a specific sender, because letterheads can be distinguished as well. This results in convenient new filtering options for publishing the collections. The medical files of DPs, for example, include documents such as X-rays which are subject to data protection and not of interest to the public. The ITS could exclude this closed group of documents from publication – something that would be almost impossible to do without using software for a collection with nearly one million documents.

While the documents in the archive were once used almost exclusively by ITS employees, today there are a variety of user groups. Students, historians and relatives of the victims of Nazi persecution have to grapple with a wide range of documents. They all want to find out quickly and easily who created the document, what it was used for and what the abbreviations mean.

To share the expertise of the ITS employees with the public, an e-Guide is being developed which will be available on the website of the ITS. Christiane Weber, the historian responsible for the project, conducted research in various institutions and talked with external experts to supplement the information in the ITS archive and make it as complete as possible.

The e-Guide will describe the most common documents, cards and questionnaires preserved in the ITS archive and will explain when they were created. In the first phase, information on 30 types of documents relating to concentration camp prisoners will be published. Later on, descriptions of the around 35 most common documents relating to displaced persons and forced laborers will be added.

The documents will be explained in simple language, and a second version of the e-Guide will be available in English. A search function will make it easy to use. Users will be able to interact with the online documents by clicking on them for more information. Quotes from survivors and additional documents from the ITS archive will explain the historical background. The e-Guide is due to be completed in stages from the second quarter of 2018 and will be an important addition to the subsequent online publication of Collection 1.1. The e-Guide can also gradually expand to include explanations of other documents.

In order to open up new channels of information, the ITS was also active in the field of digital social sciences in 2017. At the Culture Hackathon in Berlin, participants were able to access the card file of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden (Reich Association of Jews), complete with its metadata. These 32,000 cards provide an insight into the lives of Jews in Nazi Berlin. Two of the Hackathon teams – made up of programmers, web designers and augmented reality experts – developed projects based on this information. The cards known as “student cards” were the basis of the prize-winning project “Marbles of Remembrance / Murmeln der Erinnerung,” which consists of a city tour with a chatbot to find the traces of Jewish pupils in Berlin. Users can enter names from “Stolpersteine" blocks and view the associated card, or GPS can be used to notify users when they pass a former Jewish school or a home where a Jewish family lived before being deported. On two city tours, users can also get to know two Jewish children, who introduce themselves and their families via a chat app and show photos and other documents from the ITS database. For the second project, “Visualizing Jewish Life,” a programmer primarily used the metadata from the card file. On an online city map, users can see where Jewish families lived in Berlin. Statistical information is also available, such as the professions and age groups of the Jewish residents.