Description

Cengage Learning EMEA® and the Wiener Library, London are proud to present Testaments to the Holocaust, a pioneering bi-lingual Cengage Learning Digital Collection. Collected by Alfred Wiener, this unique archive is the world's oldest documentary record of the Nazi regime and its crimes against the Jewish people.

Scanned from the Series One of the microfilm collection “Testaments to the Holocaust”, published by the Cengage Learning imprint Primary Source Microfilm™ this digital archive features a fully searchable database of approximately over 100,000 images. It provides researchers with a logical, interdisciplinary research resource, and allows this unique primary source material to be quickly searched by academics and students, family historians, writers and researchers. With full-text search capabilities, researchers can conduct precise searches and comparative research across the collection. The collection has a fully bi-lingual English-German interface which can be selected from flag buttons on every screen.

Not only does Testaments to the Holocaust enable researchers to search contemporary materials in a wide variety of formats – pamphlets, books, calendars, songbooks, photographs, typescript witness statements and many other document types, but its state-of-the-art search capabilities allow students and scholars to focus their search on full text, specific keywords or phrases, title, subject and more, making research far more convenient and generating comprehensive results faster than any other resource of its kind. From the results list, the user then has the ability to link directly to the full citation for the document, and facsimile images. Testaments to the Holocaust also includes advanced page navigation options, allowing users to navigate within multi-image records such as propaganda books by using a list on the side of the screen to navigate between pages.

About the Testaments to the Holocaust Film Collection
Originally begun to amass evidence for anti-Nazi campaigning in 1928, selections from Alfred Wiener’s surviving library were published on microfilm in 1998-2000. The contents of the photographic archive, propaganda and testimony collections in a number of different languages and type-faces represent not only a challenging range of type and size of archival file for digitisation, but also a full and authentic record of the full horror of the Nazi régime and its actions.

The collection covers nearly every aspect of the Holocaust – and will be of interest to those working on Jewish, holocaust, military, political, local, family  and modern German history. The Introduction to the archive by Ben Barkow, Director of the Wiener Library guides users through the collection, and two thematic essays by leading scholars act as research guides to:

• The Origins of the Holocaust

• Prisons, ghettos and camps

All are accessible via the “Introduction” tab.

Nearly everyone who has researched any aspect of the Nazi Holocaust has relied on the Wiener Library  – this digital edition will make these resources widely and instantly available to a far larger constituency than ever before.

Back to Top

Data Digitization

A sophisticated process of digitisation and quality control has been developed specifically for the purpose of this product:

• Micro-images are duplicated and pertinent metadata information is prepared. Manual inspection of all metadata fields is performed to ensure the highest quality possible and documents are identified for individual capture during Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scanning.

• Trained scanner operators select the optimal scanning setting for each document on the microfilm.

• Images are captured as 300dpi greyscale TiF images. These are automatically cropped, de-skewed and converted to PNGs for preservation, then JPGs for online delivery. They are then manually checked for quality.

• Quality control operators view every page image for quality and metadata capture accuracy. Pages identified as poor quality are sent back for rescanning.

• Images are grouped into batches for OCR based on predefined templates to account for different document types.

• Word positional coordinates are captured for both print and manuscript text to allow for hit-term highlighting in the online product.

• Individual page output is transformed into structured XML and additional metadata information is captured based on specifications provided by Cengage Learning.

• Pages that are reviewed and determined not to meet our specifications are returned and reprocessed.

• Given the sheer number of pages of data within this collection, the physical condition of the original documents that were filmed, variant spellings, typing errors in the original documents and the variety of types of text – from German gothic fonts to type-written letters, carbon copies and hand-written items - some OCR errors are inevitable and may occasionally result in incorrect character capture, which may affect some full-text search results. However, the 99.995% accuracy of metadata capture, as well as the incorporation of fuzzy search functionality, greatly minimizes the impact such OCR errors may have on your search results.

Back to Top

Metadata

In addition to the data capture of the full text of all works within this collection, additional details associated with each work have been captured to facilitate searching and ensure accessibility of the works within this database. The majority of this information has been extracted directly from the electronic index to the microfilm collection prepared by Primary Source Microfilm, with additional data from the Wiener Library’s online library catalogue.

Several search indexes have been developed for Testaments to the Holocaust utilizing this metadata, providing users with unrivalled access to the content and providing full bibliographic details within the Full Citation created for each work. Metadata includes:

• Section Heading – the original organisational divisions within which archival material was collected (eg. Eyewitness Accounts)

• Heading: : subject category, eg. “History up to 1933: Biographical material”

• Title: the individual document description (eg. “The Danzig Jewish community 1920-1945”)

• Date: of publication, on which a photograph was taken or a witness statement recorded - please note that some items are undated

• Document Reference: the archival number for each individual item  (eg. 046-EA-0450), either allocated by the Library and apparent on the item, or created during the microfilming process and taken from Primary Source Microfilm’s electronic index to the film collection. Users should note that if they wish to use library shelf marks to call printed books at the library, this should be noted from the facsimile image if visible, or ascertained from the Wiener Library online catalogue accessible via the logo link in the top-right of the screen, as shelf-marks for printed books are not used in the microfilm or online metadata.

Back to Top

Search Paths

The primary purpose of Testaments to the Holocaust is to provide students and researchers with a single place to research and access this vast collection of documentary records and photographs. Three search paths have been designed to facilitate this research: