How Can We Ensure A Sustainable Future for Digital Holocaust Memory?
In a new working paper published by the United Nations, our Director Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden highlights key interventions needed from policymakers and funders to help shape digital Holocaust memory at a global scale.
As our research has evidenced, there is a huge amount of ‘digital imagination’ in the Holocaust heritage and education sector, but this is rarely matched with the necessary infrastructure to support the creation of digital projects and their long-term maintenance.
Furthermore, professionals often feel like they are reinventing the wheel, when colleagues elsewhere have already learnt the lessons, which they find themselves facing with each new digital venture.
During our research, we have encountered many defunct apps, alongside old hardware that could no longer allow updates to programs, unstable data connectivity, missing content, bugs and other problems.
‘Sustainability Crisis’
A new working paper, published by the United Nations, describes this as a ‘sustainability crisis’.
Its findings were informed by a workshop we held with policymakers, funders and transnational stakeholders in June 2024 in response to our recommendation reports. The workshop was held together with The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme, in the United Nations Department of Global Communications.
‘Sustainable Digital Futures for Holocaust Memory and education’ poses the question: how can we ensure digital Holocaust memory projects are not just short-lived outputs, but can be maintained long into the future?
It responds to this question by addressing policymakers and funders – a much often overlooked and yet vital group of stakeholders, whose actions are essential to the shape and form of tomorrow’s Holocaust memoryscape.
The paper does not serve as a dictate to funders and policymakers, rather it was developed in conversation with leading international players, including representatives from the European Commission, Claims Conference, European Holocaust Research Infrastructure, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Association of Jewish Refugees, and Sir Eric Pickles (then IHRA President and Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues, UK Parliament). Representatives from UNESCO and our funders, the Alfred Landecker Foundation, joined virtually.
Key Recommendations
- Establish an Interdisciplinary, Central Advisory Committee
Funders could access the Advisory Committee to support funding bids for digital projects. The Advisory Committee would include a range of expertise from digital Holocaust memory and education more specifically, to broader skills in AI, digitization, computer games etc. The Advisory Committee would be able to support applicants to develop coherent and secure data management plans with a long-term view of supporting the project and impact analysis plans. The Advisory Committee would also support funders in their assessment of data management and impact plans.
- Require that funding bids include plans for impact analysis, security, data management and long-term maintenance, and these are supported financially
Funding should offer support for skills, staffing and infrastructure development, experimentation, research, impact analysis and long-term maintenance. Grant application forms need to include technical and data management plans, and impact analysis methodology sections in order to monitor, assess and support this.
- Focus on Priorities to Ensure more Sustainable Approaches
Funders would do well to reallocate at least some funds away from short-term, small-scale projects to focus on priorities that would help ensure more sustainable approaches to digital Holocaust memory and education. This could include:
» Dedicated research funding calls focused on identifying the extent to which digital technologies might call for new Holocaust pedagogies.
» Dedicated experimental funding focused on exploring the nuances, complexity and transnational connectiveness of Holocaust-related collections, and the possibilities of using different digital technologies to emphasis these. Such funding would be free of the pressure of producing public-facing digital outputs.
» Funding workshops or other supportive measures targeting smaller organizations, teams and projects to support them to design and submit funding bids.
» Funding bids aimed at the largest of organizations to support them partnering with a network of smaller ones to help build capacity in the latter and develop formal mentoring programmes.
» Dedicated collaborative funding schemes to support Holocaust-AI literacies amongst users, possibly through school programmes or teacher training. This could be a wider programme focused on historical accuracy and/or human rights, working with organizations beyond Holocaust education to maximise reach.
- Learn from Experience
The Holocaust memory and education sector, including funders, would benefit from knowing more about the experiences of those who have developed digital projects previously. There is a need to support a transparency of process, so that organizations and teams can learn from each other. The Landecker Digital Memory Lab’s forthcoming ‘living database-archive’ will offer such a service.
- Connect Similar Projects
Funders should use their unique position – in having access to a wider range of yet unknown project ideas – to maximise capacity by connecting potentially similar projects together. This would be further enhanced if funders communicated with each other, sharing details about successful as well as unsuccessful bids and looking for ways to connect the latter where collaboration might make the projects more viable. This would of course necessitate a consent mechanism in the grant application process.
- Employ Statutory Measures to Affect Change
Transnational and intergovernmental bodies should continue to encourage tech companies and governments to affect change through statutory mechanisms.
- Establish Generative AI Platforms
Establish generative AI platforms, search engines or other digital platforms recognised for their historical specificity that could be adopted in global education efforts – this would be a major transnational project and would require support from multiple governments and funders.
Read the Full Report.
Next Steps
At the Landecker Digital Memory Lab, we are already working to move forward on some of these recommendations.
Our Digital Memory Database, launching in January 2026, will give professionals access to the experiences of others who have developed digital Holocaust memory projects.
We are now looking for policymakers and funders who want to make these changes happen. We are happy to be the driving force to get initiatives started.
If you would like to discuss putting the recommendations into action, get in touch.
Image credit: The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme, in the United Nations Department of Global Communications.