To mark International Holocaust Memorial Day, the Wiener Holocaust Library, one of the largest Nazi-era archives in the world, has launched a new online portal putting over 150,000 pages of evidence of the Holocaust and those who resisted it at the hands of researchers worldwide.

This project, to transform a unique physical collection to a cutting edge, digitised resource, is the largest and most ambitious of its kind anywhere in the UK. This new online portal, Wiener Digital Collections, provides free access to crucial documents, photos, transcripts, and testimonies that have been digitised over the past three years.

It launches with over 150,000 digitised images relating to 10,000 records evidencing the genocide of Europe’s Jews and the stories of the individuals and groups who tried to warn Europe of what was to follow in the face of antisemitic persecution. Online access to this archive of resistance will allow people all over the world to peer back into this tumultuous period of history. The work to digitise collections from this vast archive will continue, and the availability of documents and photographs online will grow over the coming years – at a rate of 100,000 pages per year.

This website allows readers around the world to access digital copies of many of the Library’s most important collections. These include the Jewish Central Information Office’s reports on the growth of antisemitism in Europe in the 1930s, as well as documents donated to the library by the Nuremberg war crimes trial authorities in return for the support the Library gave to prosecutors. Numerous photographic collections, for example photographs of Łódź ghetto, sit alongside published materials, for instance a selection of anti-Nazi writings with innocuous covers to escape censorship.

Wiener Digital Collections’ state-of-the-art viewer allows users to find the materials they want easily. It is an important tool for promoting Holocaust research and education, and for combatting the rising tide of antisemitism

Dr Toby Simpson, Director of the Library: “The Wiener Holocaust Library’s collections were gathered with an unparalleled urgency. For the Jewish refugees who built our archives, documentation was often a matter of life and death. The importance of our mission, to serve as a Library of record of the Holocaust, has hardly receded since then. The need to defend the truth has been given new urgency by the resurgence of antisemitism and other forms of misinformation and hatred.

Wiener Digital Collections provides a keystone resource for Holocaust research and education. By placing a wealth of evidence freely available online we are ensuring that the historical record is available for all regardless of their location, prior knowledge or means.”

Some of the collections now accessible online for the first time include:

• Tarnschriften (or ‘hidden writings’) were everyday pamphlets and books cleverly concealing anti-Fascist propaganda, so it could be distributed and shared among a population kept in the dark by a totalitarian regime and an unfree press. These skilfully camouflaged pamphlets, disguised as advertisments for cosmetics or shampoo, recipe books and even instruction manuals for housewives, offer a unique insight into the scale of anti-Nazi resistance in the Third Reich. The Library’s, now fully digitised, collection of almost 500 of these pamphlets is the largest outside of Germany.

• Valuable materials about fascist and anti-fascist movements in the UK including documents relating to the Battle of Cable Street, the rise of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, and Jewish anti-fascist groups which organised against the far right in Britain both before and after the Second World War. As extremist far-right figures threaten Europe and elsewhere, these collections reveal not only the origins of these dangerous ideologies, but the motivations and strategies of those throughout history who have kept them at bay.

• Nuremberg War Crimes Trials documents – This collection, donated to the library by the Nuremberg War Crimes trial authorities, comprises authenticated copies and translations into English of Nuremberg War Crimes trial documents which specifically relate to the fate of Europe’s Jews. It was donated to the Library as a quid pro quo for assistance provided to the prosecutors at the trials, and remains one of the institution’s most well used collections.

• Photographs of Auschwitz-Birkenau – Holocaust Memorial Day this year marks 80 years since the Liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army. This month visitors to the site can access photographs of the liberation.

About the Wiener Holocaust Library:

Based in London, The Wiener Holocaust Library is the world’s oldest and Britain’s largest collection of original archival material on pre-war Jewish life, the Nazi era and the Holocaust.

The Wiener is home to hundreds of thousands of documents, letters, photographs, press cuttings, books, pamphlets, periodicals and unpublished manuscripts and memoirs, posters, artworks, and eyewitness testimonies.

Wiener Digital Collections enables online access to some of our most important collections, including documents used in evidence at the Nuremberg Trials, the family papers of Jewish refugees, photos taken at the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, JCIO reports, and responses to Nazism and fascism in Germany, Britain and beyond.

On January 21st, the Filecoin Foundation announced a partnership with leading organizations like Smithsonian Institution, Flickr Foundation, Internet Archive, MIT Open Learning, and Starling Lab to safeguard over 500,000 culturally significant digital artifacts on the Filecoin network. From Alexander Graham Bell's earliest sound recordings to Flickr Commons' most viewed photographs, these datasets highlight the transformative power of decentralized storage in protecting humanity's history. By ensuring data integrity, provenance, and accessibility, Filecoin is pioneering a new era of digital preservation. Learn more about how decentralized storage is shaping the future of cultural preservation in the announcement. 

Endor Street (Horner Boulevard) in Sanford

We are excited to announce that new photographs from The Sanford Herald Photographic Print Collection at Lee County Libraries are now available on DigitalNC. In November 2023, The Sanford Herald (1930-present) donated thousands of images, spanning from the 1930s to the 2000s, to Lee County Libraries. This new back of material includes photographs from the 1930s to the 1970s that document Black community members, businesses, churches, and schools across Lee County. A selection of these photographs is featured below!

Patsy Womack, 100-Year Old Sanford Resident

n 2015, the blogging site Tumblr launched a GIF discovery feature called Tumblr TV as an experimental product. Now, with the U.S. TikTok ban leaving the fate of the short-form video app uncertain, Tumblr has decided it’s finally time to launch Tumblr TV, which has since evolved to support video, to all its users as one of its standard features. 

The company on Tuesday announced the product’s graduation from its experimental projects home known as Tumblr Labs, explaining how the tab would become available to everyone. New users will see the tab in a fairly prominent third position in the app. Meanwhile, existing users will be able to toggle Tumblr TV on or off in their Dashboard Tabs configuration settings, Tumblr said.

The decision to promote the video product from an experiment to a core feature nearly 10 years after its creation has a lot to do with the demand for TikTok alternatives in the wake of the U.S. law that banned the app and others with Chinese ownership in the country. 

Though enforcement of that ban is currently on hold after President Trump’s intervention, it’s still unclear whether TikTok will agree to a deal — despite itsmany suitors — to keep the app live in the U.S. after the 75-day deadline extension is up.

Like many apps, Tumblr saw a surge of users joining its service on the day of the TikTok ban on January 19, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. As a result, the blogging service saw a roughly 35% increase in iOS app installs and a 70% increase in new users joining Communities, a feature that allows users to join various groups focused on specific interests.

In fact, some newcomers even established Tumblr Communities, like TikTok Repository, aimed at those who want a place to back up and share their TikTok videos. Another Community, TikTok Refugees, was active with both new and returning users, the company said.

As a competitor to TikTok, however, Tumblr TV falls short. Though the company made many improvements while the service was a Labs feature — including the addition of lightbox support, improved scrubbing, and video support — the final product doesn’t feel all that much like TikTok, where original creator content dominates.

Tumblr’s video feed does allow for vertical swipe-based navigation within its channels (like Art or Sports) when viewed on mobile, similar to TikTok. But the GIFs featured in this full-screen viewing mode are naturally grainy, while many of the videos featured aren’t formatted for vertical viewing because they were never recorded for a vertical video app in the first place. 

Still, the company hopes that a video feed could make TikTok users feel a little bit more at home if they decide to move to Tumblr. 

Of course, with TikTok back online in the U.S. for the time being, the demand for a backup app is likely waning.

If you can read cursive, the National Archives would like a word.

Or a few million. More than 200 years worth of U.S. documents need transcribing (or at least classifying) and the vast majority from the Revolutionary War era are handwritten in cursive – requiring people who know the flowing, looped form of penmanship.

“Reading cursive is a superpower,” said Suzanne Isaacs, a community manager with the National Archives Catalog in Washington, D.C.

She is part of the team that coordinates the more than 5,000 Citizen Archivists helping the Archive read and transcribe some of the more than 300 million digitized objects in its catalog. And they're looking for volunteers with an increasingly rare skill.

Those records range from Revolutionary War pension records to the field notes of Charles Mason of the Mason-Dixon Line to immigration documents from the 1890s to Japanese evacuation records to the 1950 Census.

“We create missions where we ask volunteers to help us transcribe or tag records in our catalog,” Isaacs said.

To volunteer, all that’s required is to sign up online and then launch in. “There's no application,” she said. “You just pick a record that hasn't been done and read the instructions. It's easy to do for a half hour a day or a week.”

Being able to read the longhand script is a huge help because so many of the documents are written using it.

“It’s not just a matter of whether you learned cursive in school, it’s how much you use cursive today,” she said.

Cursive has fallen out of use

American’s skill with this connected form of script has been slowly waning for decades.

Schoolchildren were once taught impeccable copperplate handwriting and penmanship was something they were graded on.

That began to change when typewriters first came into common use in the business world in the 1890s and was further supplanted in the 1980s by computers.

Still, handwriting continued to be considered a necessary skill until the 1990s when many people shifted to email and then in the 2000s to texting.

By 2010, the Common Core teaching standards emphasized keyboard skills (once taught as “typewriting”) and no longer required handwriting on the presumption that most of the writing students would do would be on computers.

That led to a pushback and today at least 14 states require that cursive handwriting be taught, including California in 2023. But it doesn’t mean that they actually use it in real life.

In the past, most American students began learning to write in cursive in third grade, making it a rite of passage, said Jaime Cantrell, a professor of English at Texas A&M University - Texarkana whose students take part in the Citizen Archivist work, putting their skills reading old documents to work.

For her generation, “cursive was a coming-of-age part of literacy in the 1980s. We learned cursive and then we could write like adults wrote,” she said.

While many of her students today learned cursive in school, they never use it and seldom read it, she said. She can tell because she writes feedback on their papers in cursive.

Some of her students aren’t even typing anymore. Instead, they’re just using talk-to-text technology or even artificial intelligence. “I know that because there’s no punctuation, it reads like a stream of consciousness.”

It’s an uphill – but by no means impossible – battle to become comfortable with reading and writing the conjoined script. And it opens up access to a wealth of older documents.

Troy Area Chamber of Commerce Ambassadors joined the LHGC and TMCPL employees, as well as Troy Historical Society representatives for the ribbon cutting at LHGC’s new location at 510 W. Water St., Suite 210, Troy. The Troy Historical Society is in a partnership with LHGC. The new location offers approximately 3,000-square-feet of space.

“It’s easy for people to browse,” TMCPL Director Rachelle Via said. “We have staff able and willing to help people find what they need. ..We have library staff, but we have people that are very good at genealogy.”

Via said the building is handicapped accessible, has an elevator, additional parking space and features climate controlled storage, which she noted is very important for old documents and photographs. She said LHGC not only focuses on Miami County history, but goes outside of the boundaries of the county a little bit.

LHGC staff includes Patrick Kennedy, supervisor and archivist, who has 25 years of experience; Sandy Gurklies, a retired teacher, who has expertise in genealogy; as well as Megan Bradshaw and Brian Ganger, all of whom can assist patrons in finding information.

Via said they have a joke at LHGC, “Everyone seems to be related to Sandy (Gurklies), somehow, the further back they do their genealogy. She’s got relatives all over.”

Gurklies said the new location is very organized and “we have a really good collection.” She noted the collection is still being set up, which is a “huge job.” and that it is a combined collection of the library and the Troy Historical Society.

“This is the gem that is hidden,” Gurklies said of LHGC.

Gurklies said as they are setting up the new center, they are “discovering things we didn’t know we had. We’re hoping people will come back … again.”

One thing Gurklies is anxious to see start again is the Genealogy Junction program, where people begin to work on their genealogical history.

She explained that the program “is a good way to explore and have fun.”

There are also cemetery walks that are open to the public and held at various cemeteries in the area.

In addition to books, documents, microfilm and access to computers for research, Gurklies said, “Another thing we have are the digitized Troy newspapers.” The papers date back to the 1830s and visitors can research old news stories.

Gurklies, who enjoys helping people learn their family history, said on one occasion it was particularly rewarding. She explained that a woman visited the center who was very shy and hesitant to ask for help, but finally said she wanted information on her great-grandfather. The woman wanted to learn about him because the family “kept secrets” since he had been in prison for killing another person over a 50 cent debt.

Gurklies said she began helping the woman expose the secrets of her great-grandfather’s past.

“We got back into slave times. We found Freedmen papers. We found so much more. She (the woman) went on to research more,” Gurklies said, noting the woman was initially embarrassed by her great-grandfather’s past. “I think there was shame. I said, ‘You don’t need to be ashamed.’ We got to be good friends.”

Gurklies, who has worked at the LHGC for 10 years, said, “Genealogy has changed my life.”

She explained her father was adopted and as a result of genealogical research, she found her father’s birth family, including her father’s halfbrother, who is now 96. Although her father passed away before she could find his family, she has been able to visit with them and was able to make a scrapbook for them.

While those new to genealogy might find it overwhelming, Gurklies said, “We try to help them navigate the obstacles. … The rich, rewarding parts come when they know their history and they know the struggles (of their ancestors and see how they overcame them.) There’s a quote we (LHGC staff) like. ‘History remembers the famous. Genealogy remembers them all.’”

Via said she hopes the public will come and see what LHGC has to offer, “I think it’s a great resource for the community. I hope people stop in and check it out.”

If you want to be part of the popular ancestry search trend, you may not need to look any further than the local library. The Berkley Public Library in Berkley, Michigan is now a FamilySearch Affiliate Library, which means it has access to more genealogy resources to help you make more family discoveries. 

There are only a few hundred affiliate libraries in the country. The designation means local library patrons will now have greater and more convenient access to the wealth of genealogical resources available through FamilySearch. The popular web service has over 6 billion searchable names and 2 billion images of historical genealogical records—and you get the helpful assistance of library staff.

FamilySearch adds over 300 million free genealogical records and images online yearly from all over the world and manages the famous FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City. It has amassed billions of birth, marriage, death, census, land and court records from more than 130 countries to help you discover and make family connections.

“Libraries are wonderful local gathering places for learning. We are excited to have Berkley Public Library as our newest FamilySearch Affiliate Library.  It will help FamilySearch expand opportunities for fun, personal discoveries and family connections to the local community,” said Paul Nauta, FamilySearch Public Relations Manager.

FamilySearch is the largest genealogy organization in the world. FamilySearch is a nonprofit, volunteer-driven organization sponsored by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Millions of people use FamilySearch records, resources, and services to learn more about their family history. To help in this great pursuit, FamilySearch and its predecessors have been actively gathering, preserving, and sharing genealogical records worldwide for over 100 years. Patrons may access FamilySearch services and resources for free at FamilySearch.org or through more than 5,000 FamilySearch centers in 129 countries, including the main FamilySearch Library in Salt Lake City, Utah.

A few years ago, Penn Italian-language lecturer Julia Heimbegan to notice a “huge disconnect” between the representation of Italian life in primary textbooks and the “actual, real lived experience in Italy.”

The textbooks were very homogenous, leaving out the experiences and lives of underrepresented Italians. In response, Heim found themself creating activities for their students with video clips to show that reality—including Italians of color, from the LGBTQ community, with disabilities, and others.

“It’s really important to recognize that Italy is a multicultural space. It isn’t just the kind of thing you might see in ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ right?” says Heim, a scholar and translator of Italian media. “It is a living culture that we really need to do justice to. All Italians deserve a space.”

Four years ago, those activities grew into a full project, creating resources for learners across the Italian-language community. Heim secured a grant from the Penn Language Center and hired graduate student Samantha Gillen, now a lecturer at the University of Georgia, to work with them developing more activities. Fellow Penn lecturer Rossella Di Rosa joined as contributor and linguistic overseer, reviewing all the content as a native Italian speaker.

Additional support came from the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, the Penn Libraries Research Data & Digital Scholarship team, and a Sachs Curricular Support Grant. “We hit the ground running,” Heim says.

At the beginning, the project was a simple shared account to hold the projects, with each folder containing a video, a transcript, and the actual exercises, translated into both English and Italian and available in PDF and editable documents in case changes needed to be made later.

The project soon had a name, PRIMA, the Pedagogical Repository for Italian Media Activities. It launched in late 2024 at primalearning.org.“This isn’t just meant to teach the language but use all the voices that Italy has to offer,” Heim says.

As an open educational resource, PRIMA is intended to grow as others add to it. “Our primary goal is just spreading the word right now,” Heim says. “We’ve incorporated it into our classes at Penn, but I’m hoping anyone will find it useful because what a fun way to learn a language.”

Heim says a printed textbook “is so stale; once you print it, it can’t be changed.” By contrast, PRIMA is meant to be added to and grow “so in a way, it is an archive of the different kinds of historical moments of representation.”

The early years were spent developing activities and beta testing with both faculty and students, asking questions about what audiences were looking for, material formats, and what accessibility means. That core value ensures that learners can use the resources in multiple formats and on different devices.

The PRIMA site was designed to be used via two approaches: a traditional level-based format, where users can focus on elementary, intermediate, or advanced levels, and a topical system, where users can search lessons on culture, grammar, and vocabulary. Learning grammar through new songs, for example, may be more interesting for learners than other methods, Heim says.

Heim says the language-studies field includes many people who believe in inclusive practices. “But it isn’t necessarily yet a safe space for all learners or for all teachers,” they say. “I hope this is a first step that goes beyond tokenizing minority voices or checking a box for inclusivity.”

They add: “Language courses are often the last to catch up because the textbooks are very antiquated or outdated, but also because there are a lot of people that believe in a static, ‘traditional’ language. The feedback that I often get is, ‘Well, we have to teach real Italian first, and then we can make space.’ I don’t think that that’s true because you’re basically saying that my identity cannot be represented in my own language class.”

The Long Beach Island Historical Association announces the launch of “Island Voices,” an oral history project now available on its website. This extensive collection features the stories of historians, witnesses and participants who have shaped the rich cultural tapestry of the Island. In development since 2022, the project has produced a series of finished videos, with additional video content forthcoming.

In alignment with its mission to transport audiences to a unique coastal locale and celebrate the lives of those who cherish it, the project provides an audio-visual archive of interviews, accompanied by photographs and a selection of artifacts on display at the LBI Historical Museum in Beach Haven. These compelling narratives highlight the strength and resilience of LBI’s longtime residents and reflect their deep affection for the island they proudly call home.

“Oral history serves as a vital tool for preserving personal experiences and bridging gaps in documented history, enhancing the research and curation efforts of scholars and experts alike,” the association said. “Island Voices offers a fresh perspective on LBI through the personal accounts of individuals who have lived here for nearly 90 years.

“Viewers can expect to hear enchanting tales involving movie theaters, boardwalks, trampoline parks, and the type of summer fun that has people returning to this island for generations. There are also stories of early life on the island and the adventurous and treacherous life of pound fisherman. Each story is a treasured memory that resonates with both the storyteller and the many residents and visitors who return year after year.”

“This exhibit will empower residents, visitors and historians to engage with the living history of our museum and the Island,” stated Ron Marr, past association president. “It also reinforces the museum’s relevance within the community, as outlined in our mission statement.”

Denise Cleveland, association president, added, “We are committed to advancing our mission as educators – sharing the history of LBI through these videos with everyone. It is our ongoing responsibility to bring these firsthand stories to our valued members, guests and friends of the Association, ensuring future generations can access this wealth of knowledge.”

For those interested in being interviewed for the project or learning more about it, contact the association at LBIslandvoices@gmail.com. To view the oral history videos, visit the museum website at lbihistoricalmuseum.org/island-voices.  —E.E.

A man whose partial remains were found in a vacant apartment building in Detroit in 1998 has been identified as Robert Booker Jr. 

In the meantime, a murdered man whose body was found in downtown Detroit in 1981 has been identified as Jerry Tate. 

The DNASolves database, which works with law enforcement to make identification in outstanding cases, made the announcements on both cases this week. Booker and Tate were the 12th and 13th cases, respectively, cases in the state of Michigan where identification was made using the resources of Ostram laboratory in Texas; and publicly announced by DNASolves.

Robert Booker Jr.

Robert Booker Jr., whose partial remains have been identified through advanced DNA efforts.

DNASOLVES DATABASE

Booker's case involves partial human remains found in May 1998 as a construction crew demolished a vacant apartment building near East Grant Boulevard and Ferry Street in Detroit, the agency says. 

The man could not be identified, but the case was entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. A traditional DNA profile also was developed. 

"Despite the efforts of investigators, the man could not be identified, and the case was old for nearly three decades," the agency said.  

The Detroit Police Department teamed up with Othram in March 2022 to determine if newer forensic testing and genetic genealogy research could lead to more information. Othram's scientists sent their findings to the FBI forensic genetic genealogy team. 

With the new details, further investigation led to potential family members of the unidentified man. He was then determined to be Booker, who was born Nov. 18, 1959. 

Michigan Department of Corrections records show that Booker escaped from prison on Jan. 5, 1996. He had started serving a sentence on Nov. 1, 1995, on a charge of breaking and entering on a coin telephone.

Jerry Tate 

Jerry Tate, whose body was identified through advanced DNA efforts.

DNASOLVES DATABASE

Tate's case involves a badly burned body found in March 1981 near railroad tracks near 12th and Stanley Streets in Detroit, the agency said.  

"His manner of death was determined to be homicide," the report said. 

However, the body could not be identified, and the details of the case were entered into the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System. 

A forensic composite image depicting how he may have looked when alive was released to the public, and traditional DNA testing took place.  

"Despite the efforts of investigators, the man could not be identified, and the case was cold for nearly five years," the report said. 

Detroit Police Department began working with Othram in January 2023 to see if new leads could be developed. Othram's scientists sent their findings to the FBI, and a follow-up investigation led to potential family members. 

He was then determined to be Tate, who was born in February 1948. 

Other Michigan cases that have been solved through this partnership include the identity of Tannisha Marie Eddison, whose remains were found in 2011 in Trenton; the identity of Darlynn Washington, whose remains were found in 2006 in Detroit; and the identity of Robert L. McDaniel, whose remains were found in 1979 in Van Buren County. 

Funding for the advanced DNA testing and forensic genetic genealogy work came from the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NAMUS), a national clearinghouse whose goal is to assist law enforcement agencies with the investigation and resolution of missing and unidentified people.