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 [...]