Archives Catalogues as Data

TASK: Turn 1990s archival descriptions in print inventories into machine-actionable, online accessible data

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APPROACH: Collections-as-data

GROUP MEMBERS

Yael Netzer

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Aaron Christianson

Elena Hamidy

Amalia Levi

Imme Klages

9 printed volumes

Original database ‘lost’

5 Volumes are digitized

Background

• Until 1989 - hardly any access to Jewish archival materials in DDR
• After German reunification: concerted effort to locate+increase access
• Identifying Jewish resources in Archives of East Germany (5 states)
• Central, state, regional, city, university, business archives
• Jewish community archives, business and personal archives
• 1 comprehensive inventory and then detailed inventories

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“Collections as Data”

https://collectionsasdata.github.io/

Human readable - Machine Actionable

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Yerushah project https://www.yerusha-search.eu/viewer/index/

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Description of institution and relevant Jewish collections

Notepad++ with regexp

GOALS

Continue working with all volumes (this is only one volume out of 9)

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Networks: locations, persons, timeline…

Mapping: reconcile and link locations

Persons: reconcile and link [to other collections too]

Linking archives/records to digital catalogues.

Find interesting things through distant reading archival descriptions!

Notepad++ with regexp

https://undusting.org/jewish_sources/s/jewish_sources/page/home

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Omeka-S

Exiles in “Quellen zur Geschichte der Juden in den Archiven der Neuen Bundesländer”

Types of Organisation of a Book (Institutionenregister)/ digital edition possibilities

• Translation into English
• Vocabulary machine readable
• More categories
• Historical/ still active institutions

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Schocken

(reply to Sinai’s question)

Combining indexes to link persons to locations (Gephi-Graph)

https://undusting.org/jewish_sources/s/jewish_sources/page/Locations

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https://undusting.org/jewish_sources/s/jewish_sources/page/Locations

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https://undusting.org/jewish_sources/s/jewish_sources/page/Locations

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https://undusting.org/jewish_sources/s/jewish_sources/page/Locations

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LIMITATIONS OF AVAILABLE DATA

• Not an in-person survey, information contributed by archives
• Index of archives “with no Jewish materials”
• Opportunity for further research
• Included: materials with clear “Jewish” reference
• Possibly lots of material missing
• Problematic legacy titles (e.g., “Mischling” or “Aryanization”) carried over
• Need for research to better contextualize past archival practices
• Important to read extracted data alongside the introduction + directions to users in each volume.
• So online users can understands issues, challenges, limitations with data they see online

Lessons Learned

Always be suspicious towards resources

• Add ‘the unknown’ to your collection

Catalogues as data, books as data: think about future process of creation

Paradata/Provenance should not be neglected or ignored

Modeling of knowledge is an iterative, community-based process

Hackathons are effective and fun