Yad Vashem makes 130 thousand photos available on the Internet
In the official announcement we can read that “it is the first step towards creating the biggest publicly available collection devoted to the Holocaust”.
“Our goal is to find new and innovative ways, so that the rich data from our archives would be available and so that a global audience could find this collection easily” – explained Avner Shalev, director of Yad Vashem.
Among the materials made available are photos of death transports, inmates of concentration camps, deportations and destroyed ghettos, as well as pictures from family albums.
The photos on the Yad Vashem website are published in high definition. The Institute hopes that thanks to making the 130 thousand pictures available, the archive will be enriched – every user can add his stories and accounts through the website.
It was possible to create such a database thanks to the cooperation of Yad Vashem with Google. The company worked out the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) system, enabling users to search through the resources.
As Shalev explains: „Google is an integral partner in our mission, as it helps us reach new recipients, among them young people from the whole world. Itenables users to adopt an active attitude towards the discussion on the Holocaust”.
This initiative is not the first attempt made by Yad Vashem to use the Internet. Two years ago a special Yad Vashem channel was opened on YouTube, which presents accounts of the Holocaust victims.
