The Kansas City Jewish Community Digital Archive, jewishkcarchives.org/, is launching with digital issues of The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle’s entire back catalog, plus local history video interviews — and it’s looking to the community to help it grow more. 

Powered by work from Andrew Kaplan, Alan Edelman and Norman Kahn, its first phase was building the web interface so people could access materials, as well as making old microfilm copies of The Chronicle digital and searchable by keyword and issue. That required a partnership with BMI Imaging Systems in Sacramento to get the technical side of the optical character recognition done.

“If you were doing research and you wanted to know what was going on as it relates to Chaim Weitzman, you can get to that very quickly and look at specific information as to what was going on right then at the time [in Kansas City],” Kaplan said. 

With the keyword search, it’s easy to find anyone by name in old copies of The Chronicle. Anything that was already stored in digital, searchable form was much easier to include.

The Chronicle “was the best, most accurate, most available source of information that covered the community,” Kaplan said.

Added to that package is video interviews of locals conducted by Sybil Kahn over a number of years. Hosted on YouTube, they are also currently linked in the archive.

You can read more in an article by Beth Lipoff published in the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle web site at: https://bit.ly/3tV0XxN.