International Shoah Archivists Working Forum

International Cooperation in Cataloging

Holocaust-Related Archival Materials

At the meeting held in New York in March 2004, there was consensus that cataloging should be considered a major priority in order to improve access to Holocaust documentation. While some institutions have made major strides in cataloging, others do not yet have basic descriptions of their collections. It was therefore decided that descriptions of collections should be compiled by all relevant institutions using categories preliminarily presented by Yad Vashem and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum at the Forum.

Discussion by members of the Cataloging Working Group, led by Esther Aran of Yad Vashem and Henry Mayer of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, has now led to a standard input form with instructions for the description of Holocaust-related collections. It is anticipated that, once the information reported in this standardized form in MS-Word will be provided by the various institutions, it will be possible to create a searchable database in either Excel or Access. To test the system, each institution is requested to complete 20 forms for 20 collections and to submit them to Henry Mayer (hmayer@ushmm.org), who will use the forms as test data to create the database.

Please click on the links to the left to see the standard input form and instructions.

For the moment, descriptions of collections will be placed on the password-protected web site of the Forum. When fully prepared, the descriptions of collections will be made public and links created to them.