 Hello everybody. My name is Jessica Green. I'm the digital asset and web manager at the VEDA library, and this is my manager Toby Simpson our head of digital so The the roots of the testimonies project we're going to talk about today began with the libraries relaunched in 2011 the start of a four-year heritage lottery funded project entitled keeping truth alive This grant supported new educational and outreach opportunities for the library as well as serving as a massive boost to our digital presence With a new website new social media presence and our first digital resource My colleague Toby was managing this project overall and one part of it involved starting up a small group of volunteer translators The group grew over time and we become instrumental to the two projects. We are presenting about today As the library's first digital curator, that was my first Title at the library. I worked on a number of digital projects including the pogrom November 1938 website Which you can see up here As well as our first digital resource that showcased a collection of refugee family papers in our library Which Toby and I presented on back at the DC-DC conference and leads in 2015 So just spent a few minutes now telling you about the pogrom night pogrom November 1938 website Which was something of a pilot project for the work we are doing today around digital resources for Holocaust testimony Today Toby and I will be talking about two very rare and pair powerful sets of early testimonies The first of which is a collection of about 350 reports that were gathered By the library's founder Alfred Wiener and his colleagues at the Jewish Central Information Office in Amsterdam in the days weeks and months Following the November pogrom of 1938 more commonly known as Kristallnacht or the night of broken glass Today the library speculates that the reports were sourced using the JCIO's several usual usual methods of information gathering Including face-to-face interviews telephone conversations letters and written reports Selecting and cropping newspaper articles and obtaining informal intelligence via conversations and correspondence with their known organizations and contacts No voice recordings or original text format survive. So the first version of the testimonies we have in our possession are a series of typed reports This unique collection presented a number of opportunities and challenges regarding access and dissemination to a wider audience The accounts offer a wider picture of rising anti-semitism in the 1930s Hostility to refugees outside of Germany and occupied Austria and the first descriptions of early concentration camps like Dachau and Buchenwald They also highlight a number of things to modern readers Such as the reality that the survivor generation is passing away and the urgent need for effective Holocaust education around the world The work of Holocaust survivors has played an important educational role across communities in the UK and visits of survivors to schools have contributed greatly to Enriching young people's understanding of issues of tolerance diversity and citizenship in the years to come. However These visits will become increasingly impossible as those with personal memories get older and pass away With our rare collections of early eyewitness testimony The library has the potential to address this community need by reviving the voices of a generation of Holocaust survivors whose life stories are already passing from memory into history By preserving and sharing the voices of the oppressed the library continues its mission to be a living memorial to the evils of the past Although there is no doubt not to in our minds as to the importance of preserving and sharing these collections The method for doing so presented a number of unique challenges One challenge was that the vast majority of the counts are in German With a handful also in Dutch French and English If we were to make these collections accessible to as wide an audience as possible We would first have to translate them into English Luckily, we had an incredibly dedicated volunteer who is sadly no longer with us by the name of Ruth Levitt who led a small team of volunteers in translating the entire lot The guidelines and editor editorial principles that she developed during this process were used as a framework for translating the larger Set of testimonies Toby will talk about in a minute Another major Challenge was the practical development of a digital resource that would serve as a companion website to the book publication of New English Translations Again, we were very lucky that Ruth was able to find Pete Pete Vox of the London based web developers images Who graciously worked with us to develop the website pro bono using the open source content management system mod X The websites original features included the new English translations side-by-side to downloadable PDFs of the original documents contextual historical information and photographs a detailed historical timeline and links to relevant books and web resources in addition to a full-text search users can browse the testimonies by name subject and place keywords as Well as follow links to relevant testimonies Since one of the editorial principles was to leave Nazi terminology and anti-Semitic insults in the original German the development of a detailed Glossary and in-text tooltips allows for better understanding of the text by English speakers and those less familiar with World War two history or the German language Over the years we have continued to enhance the website and improve the quality of translations One of the new features we added with the help of a freelance sub editor was to upload Transcriptions of the original German Dutch and French texts allowing for full-text searching of these as well as the English translations So I'm just going to to pick up the story at that point Where the the website had launched and it happened to be a time Which allowed us to take advantage of an opportunity to expand the project And one of the great things about that November program project is it allowed us to first of all grow this small group of volunteer translators Which continues to this day in an expanded form but we were also able to demonstrate the demand for and the and the impact of the the project To others especially through the Google analytics which showed that there had been a Big take up of the project among our researchers with several thousand unique users per year that it was growing year on year So it really helped us to demonstrate that there were people out there who wanted to hear these voices From from these testimonies that are incredibly vivid and direct So we were lucky enough that We were ready at the time when the UK government was starting to develop its plans for a UK Holocaust Memorial Near Parliament and so we were in a good position to put in a bid for funding for a larger and more ambitious project so I Suspect some of you will have already heard about this Memorial and Learning Center. It's going to be built in Westminster's Victoria Tower Gardens in the coming years according to a design by the world renowned architect David Adjaye and It's one of the major aspects of the memorial is to include resources That come directly that share directly the voices of Holocaust survivors and The Vina library is quite unusual in having such important collections of eyewitness testimonies from Holocaust survivors and in particular Early testimonies and I think that's that's the important thing about these these collections is that they showcase the voices of Holocaust survivors of an earlier generation and they're very Both collections in different ways have this very direct vivid power Having been composed so close to the events themselves So broadly speaking as Jess said there are two collections one of them relating specifically to the November pogrom which is a Relatively smaller collection, but there's also a much larger collection of eyewitness testimonies held at the Vina library which was gathered by the Then head of research Ava Reichman who's who's pictured here She managed over the course of six years between 1954 and 1960 to gather some 1300 survivor testimonies which in total is approximately one million words of testimony in 8,000 pages so it absolutely immense corpus of material It's quite daunting for us that we wanted to to expand our translation work to to embrace that and really without the The opportunity that was offered by this new memorial and the funding that that came along with it It would have been completely impossible to to attempt to translate such a large and varied amount a set of material but especially having worked with this material over the past Five years or so. I really have a sense of how each voice within it and it's incredibly varied people from Dozens of different countries from so many at such a varied different experiences each account has its own value It's quite an extraordinary collection And it was one of the collections that helped the library recently be awarded designated collection status by the Arts Council, which really you know was something that really recognized the Exceptional historical value of this material. So as Jess said, you never really had any doubt about the value of This material But the question was how to take a huge corpus of material mostly in German and make it more accessible for people and of course translation Was a huge part of that? So These the award that we received from the Department of Communities and local government seems like a lot of money But actually as I've already mentioned the sheer scale of this collection ruled out the possibility even of translating the corpus in In full by outsourcing the material and we didn't want to just translate the material and then leave it there in the collections We wanted to translate it and do a lot more For example, the the collection wasn't properly digitized. It wasn't transcribed in the original language Very little research had been done into the origins of the collection So when we bid for this grant we Committed to all of these additional aims as well So at the core of the project of course, however was Translation and this was a complex Task of trying to set out the different strands of it Of the work that was involved and we really didn't want to stop doing volunteer translation either because first of all We had built up a really quite skilled group of volunteer translators who were producing excellent work and so we actually wanted to expand that it was also a good way of engaging with The wider community to bring in people there was a lot of it I was actually really surprised by the amount of people who wanted to get involved with volunteer translation But of course managing that volunteer translation was a challenge in itself We also were you know, it was a real novelty for us to have any kind of budget to spend on translation so we We decided that the best way to approach that was to do a competitive tender to encourage as many different Translation companies as possible to apply We completed the digitization and transcription of the material before that And in 2017 we chose to work with a company called lifeline language services They were the most cost effective, but they also had demonstrated experience doing work with eyewitnesses in the international criminal court They demonstrated a real sensitivity to working with translators dealing with what was often very distressing material And they've been really good so far and one of the things that has been good is they've been very flexible in terms of us Delivering batches of work to them which where we which reflects our needs sometimes to change priorities about which accounts should be translated first And we also decided that rather than having the quality assurance done on every single Item we would we would focus on to an extent on output rather than Than detailed quality assurance And so we decided to the method it would be better to do that by a sampling method So that does bring me to the question of quality assurance so we we of course take quality assurance very seriously and we Wanted to ensure that the the translations reached a certain standard and that was one of the reasons that we developed clear editorial guidelines an English language style guide Which has actually been very useful for our organization as a whole to adopt a kind of house style to How we present the English language? and so we Have developed good workflows for QA of this material But at the same time the sheer volume of it means that there is actually an always going to be an element of error And there is always going to be an element of risk as well So what we have really decided is that we Don't aren't going to see this as a as a kind of linear Process where we get to a certain point and all the translations are perfect And then we press go we recognize that in in the in the era of online resources where it's possible Unlike in a book to make improvements after launch We see it as a continuous process of improvement and that's actually something that we did also with the November program project where we've continued to Encourage people to report any errors that they may find we've continued to to Ask volunteers and copy editors to get involved with improving the quality and actually the quality has of the Translations is is very good But we recognize this there's never going to be perfection in this regard unless we want to sacrifice access So that does lead to some of the issues of problems and challenges The it has been adorning for an organization like ours Which is relatively small and hasn't taken on a project a translation project on this scale to manage the volume of metadata the the the file management the quality assurance And so as we're leading we're aiming towards launching the the expanded website towards April next year and As we're leading on to this we're sort of getting to a critical mass where we are uploading files converting files And there's a lot of file management and workflow management involved with that and one of the things that has been quite helpful is I've been using a translation software called deja vu by a company called actual which does have an excellent kind of Project management where you can have a sort of structured hierarchical files and you can compare the original with the translation It also gives you an export preview and it is compatible with a really large number of file types For import and export so that has been incredibly useful actually for the management of the project We also have had to overcome issues with relation to cataloging so this actually Was the first collection really well these two collections the November program testimonies and the and and the 1950s testimonies are the first collection where we've really had to manage a large volume of item level metadata and digital objects together and I'm not going to go into the granular detail of that, but I think the point I want to make is that The November there's the smaller scale project allowed us to catalog that in full to do it with isadji compliant records And that has given us a template for the larger project so in a way by breaking down this massive Project and having a pilot which is based on a smaller thing We were quite lucky that they had their similarities in that respect But it definitely helped us to get to grips with with this very large collection and how we would manage the records How we would describe the material and how we would get it uploaded onto our collection management system We've also had to negotiate issues relating to copyright and data protection and again You know that is also a question of the management of risk But it's also been an opportunity for us to reach out to our audiences We've made efforts to try and contact the Interviewees and also their descendants. It has been a bit of a challenge Perhaps not surprising considering the average age of the people who gave eyewitness testimonies in the 1950s is over a hundred so We have there we are in contact with a few stills surviving People who gave testimonies, but we're also attempting to contact descendants and we see that as an opportunity for outreach and also of course It's a question of risk management around issues like copyright and data protection. I think I'm just going to finish by saying we've had I Sorry, just this is an example of how the smaller collection of testimonies and how we cataloged them on the item level and shows you Just a little glimpse of the kinds of metadata and keywords that we've been attaching to the records And finally, I just want to talk about a few hurdles and challenges that we've had to overcome except for that perhaps One of the things that has been difficult as we've tried to This has been a major expansion of our digital collections and we've The solution that we've looked towards for which Jess is about to talk about for our websites and digital infrastructure relied on Fiberoptic and actually our fiber optic connection only just went live a couple of weeks ago After 18 months of having gone through the application and building process So that just goes to show how some of the critical elements of it can really sort of throw the bigger project Off but we yes, and of course we had to go through multiple issues with our cataloging But we've got there in the end and we think that the product in is going to really be worth the wait So I'm just going to hand over to Jess to talk about what we're going to Okay, so I'll just go through this very quickly, but Basically instead of creating one website to showcase both sets of testimonies We decided to use the same platform to create two very similar websites each with the same Framework and basic functionality with slightly different looks and feels These will this will bring together all the work that we've been doing over the past couple years around transcription translation cataloging and research In the past both sets of testimonies have been made available in their original German on the subscription based Testaments the Holocaust database by Cengage Gale But our two new websites including the first iteration of the program November 1938 website Increased public access by making them available in English making them available online for free and presenting them a separate collections with their relevant historical contextual information But while we feel it's important to have two separate websites to really contextualize these testimonies We want people to be able to stumble upon these collections while searching for relevant material or themes in our collections catalog or on Google So we added another dimension to this project Because and making it made it our first real attempt at creating a truly integrated approach to digital resources So this is a shift away from the more typical kind of digital island as we've been calling it approach Taken by most heritage organizations including ourselves so we will basically be Catalogging each of these testimonies first in our collections catalog based on showing what what Toby just showed a second ago And then use the catalogs API to dynamically display relevant metadata for each of the accounts on a separate website Using a digital viewer developed by a German company called Entranda It has a number of plugins as well That will allow us to take advantage of really rich features for audience engagement Including on the fly PDF generation a triple AF compliant image API Embedded search engine based on Apache solar Things like allowing users to create their own collections and add comments to images a flexible access conditions based on API IP addresses So just to quickly show you here's some mock-ups that we've made That will show what the new websites will look like so as you can see they kind of have the same framework But a slightly different look and feel on the left. You'll see a results page Amit that will have fasted browsing Based on vener library keywords that were added as part of the cataloging process And on the right you see on the left will be a tab for Metadata and that's being pulled from our from our collections catalog. So we'll be sitting in there as well In the middle, you'll have The original German text and the English translation An actual scan of the object as well as a document blog That we're planning to use the omeka neat line plugins so we can build Visualizations like timelines and maps and on the right some related testimonies So, yeah, we'll have questions later. Thank you