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So far Ben has created 2 blog entries.

Spotlight: The Falstad Centre

By Dr. Ben Pelling Our Spotlight series takes a deeper dive into the digital offerings of worldwide memorial sites. This week, Dr. Ben Pelling looks at how the Falstad Museum, Memorial and Human Rights Centre has used technology to enhance its offerings and educational programme and how it overcame some of the challenges this has presented.  Within the top 5 results following a Google search of “Falstad Prison Camp” is a page from the Visit Norway website announcing a guest house for up to 55 guests and the description: “Experience serenity in a rural setting at the Falstad Center, a national memorial situated within the main building of the former German prison camp, SS Strafgefangenlager Falstad, dating back to World War II.” Guests can access the museum’s exhibitions, libraries and more. While perhaps surprising, this is actually just one in a long line of reinventions and changes in the history of the former prison camp. Falstad: School, Prison, Museum & Memorial The remote site was first established in 1895 as a Reformative School for Troubled Boys, part of a movement that at the time was seen as a progressive. But in October 1941, the occupying German forces seized the property [...]

By |2025-09-18T15:13:00+01:0018 September 2025|

Building a Living Database, Part 2: Gathering and Preparing Content

On the back of our first round of user testing of our flagship resource the Digital Memory Database, Lab Research Fellow Dr Ben Pelling gives an insight into how we approach cataloguing, indexing, preserving and presenting a wealth of digital Holocaust projects from around the world.   Following the launch of our Digital Memory Map on 15 April, to coincide with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, we are now focused on the development of the Digital Memory Database. The Database will expand on the map, providing a regularly-updated resource for professionals working in Holocaust memory and education, their creative partners and academics. Details of projects and their associated organisations will be complemented, where organisations give us permission, by walkthrough recordings of the digital projects themselves and interviews with those who created, curated and manage them. It is a major resource unlike any other. It will allow Holocaust memory professionals to learn from existing practice, connect with projects across the globe and let them discover other digital Holocaust memory projects. We hope that it will amplify peripheral stories of the Holocaust and throw into sharp relief where digital Holocaust memory is at risk. Here is how [...]

By |2025-08-01T09:57:07+01:0015 May 2025|
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