Judaica Europeana – an international network of museums, libraries and archives that was launched in 2010 – announces that in its first two years it uploaded 3.7 million digital objects to Europeana.eu, Europe’s cultural heritage portal and digital services platform. This immense amount of material has exceeded its target goal, creating a vast digital archive of Jewish books, documents, objects, photographs, postcards, posters, music recordings and videos.
The digitized material ranges from 16-18th century documents on the Venice Ghetto from the Venice State Archives, the Jewish museums’ collections from Amsterdam, Athens, London and Toledo; the extensive archive and library collections of Frankfurt University and Alliance Israelite Universelle, the archival collections from the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw and the Hungarian Jewish Archives in Budapest, and much more. A priceless collection of Yiddish press, books and music comes from the Medem Library in Paris: 4,000 recordings of Jewish music from East-Central Europe can be played online. This collection is complemented by the recordings and scores from the French Centre for Jewish Music. The National Library of Israel provided access to a collection of manuscripts and rare books, and will contribute more.
Europeana’s multilingual search engine, tagging facilities and vocabularies provide a unique finding aid for browsing all the collections at europeana.eu. To-date over 2,000 heritage institutions in 33 countries provide access to their digital collections to Europeana.
“We are delighted with the network’s achievements and shall continue to work together to bring more priceless collections online. We are planning more workshops, e-newsletters and exhibitions that will reach out to researchers, students, heritage professionals and the general public” said Lena Stanley-Clamp the Co-ordinator of Judaica Europeana and Director of the European Association for Jewish Culture. “The Linked Open Data environment is transforming the web. Thanks to Europeana, a leading force in this field, we are well placed to provide integrated access to Jewish heritage collections.” (For more information on Europeana and Linked Open Data see http://vimeo.com/36752317 )
The European Association for Jewish Culture and Judaica Europeana are members of the Europeana Network of heritage institutions from 33 countries. They are also partners in a new European project ‘Digital Manuscripts to Europeana’ http://dm2e.eu/ led by Humboldt University in Berlin.
3 comments on “Judaica Europeana brings online 3.7 million digital objects from Jewish collections”
good work by them
Nice work by the Europana library, by uploading interesting info on internet.