Worldwide Accessibility to Yizkor Books

Abstract

Yizkor Books contain firsthand accounts of events that occurred before, during, and after the Holocaust. These books were published with parts in thirteen languages, across six continents, spanning a period of more than 60 years and are an important resource for research of Eastern European Jewish communities, Holocaust studies, and genealogical investigations. Numerous Yizkor Book collections span the globe. One of the largest collections of Yizkor Books is housed within the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Due to their rare and often fragile conditions, the original Yizkor Books are vastly underutilized. Ongoing efforts to digitize and reprint Yizkor Books increases the availability of the books, however, the capability to search information about their content is nonexistent. We established a centralized index for Yizkor Books and developed a detailed search interface accessible worldwide, capable of efficiently querying the data. Our interface offers unique features and provides novel approaches to foreign name and location search. Furthermore, we describe and demonstrate a rule set to assist searches based on inaccurate terms. This system is currently under the auspices of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.KeywordsJewish CommunitySearch InterfaceAlternate SpellingMetadata DatabaseYork Public LibraryThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.