Over the past few decades, libraries and archives around the world have been tackling the immense project of digitizing and indexing historical records, which ensures that records will be safely stored and enables researchers to more easily access them. The lockdown caused by the Coronavirus pandemic has offered a unique opportunity for the Arolsen Archives to crowdsource records indexing. The Arolsen Archives houses more than 30 million records of Nazi persecution over 16 miles of shelving. It is the largest collection of its kind in the world and includes train manifests, delousing records, work detail assignments and execution records among many, many others.
The Arolsen Archives’ records were originally collected by Allied forces following World War II and were then entrusted to the International Committee of the Red Cross, which created the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen (ITS) to manage the records. The ITS, which eventually became the Arolsen Archives – International Center on Nazi Persecution, utilized the records to help families reunite or attain some closure over lost relatives. The archive began the process of scanning and digitizing its records in the 1980s and over the last 20 years has had between 20 and 30 staffers indexing documents daily. The result is an indexed database that allows users to search for victims of Nazi persecution. Nonetheless, a large portion of the archive’s collection (handwritten prisoner lists, faded records or other material that is difficult to decipher ) has still not been indexed by name. The archive has attempted to use private companies, such as Ancestry.com, however computers have limited capability to analyze old records that may be smudged or that feature a wide range of hand-writing styles.
Facing the daunting task of indexing millions of documents – the archive estimates that as many as 40 million names in the archive are still not indexed --the Arolsen staff came up with the “Every Name Counts” project, which invites amateur archivists to help index names from the collection’s records. Last year, the archive signed up with a service call Zooniverse, a crowdsourcing platform that enables volunteers to help with academic research projects by analyzing small portions of large data sets. After a successful test run with German high school students in January, the archive was poised to gradually expand the project when the Coronavirus pandemic broke out in March. A spike in interest from volunteers led the archive to expedite plans and, on April 24, archive staff posted tens of thousands of documents from the Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen concentration camps to Zooniverse. In the past month and a half, volunteers have added over 120,000 names, birth dates and prisoner numbers to the database.
The project not only helps ensure the victims of Nazi persecution are not forgotten, but also helps raise awareness of an important part of our history. As Paul Shapiro, the director of international relations at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, said “These collections are an insurance policy against forgetting. A real document is concrete proof.”