The largest European research project about the Holocaust – the European Holocaust Research Institute (EHRI) portal, allows people from the across the world access to rare and dispersed Holocaust materials.

Researchers from the  Digital Humanities department at King’s –  Dr Tobias Blanke,  Dr Mike Bryant and  Dr Reto Speck, worked on developing the sustainable, world-class tool ,providing access to descriptions of tens of thousands of materials including documents, objects, photos, film and art.

Short film released on the project launch

The team were all involved in focus groups with research users, formulating effective functional and data requirements for a portal of this scale, and conceptualising and building the EHRI portal.

Dr Blanke, a lead partner on the project, puts much of the project’s success down to working with such varied partners; over 1,800 Holocaust-related archives from 51 countries, including the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yad Vashem, NIOD in Amsterdam and London’s Wiener Library, make up the portal.

‘Working collaboratively within such a large and varied consortium is first and foremost very enriching,’ he said. ‘To a large extent, EHRI’s success has been driven by the successful cross-fertilisation of the partners’ different perspectives, which has occurred along different trajectories: disciplinary borders (historians, archivists, digital humanists), regional borders (Western, Eastern, Southern Europe and Israel), and institutional missions and structures (small and large institutions, memory and research institutions).’

Image licensed under Creative Commons: Luke McKernan, Holocaust Memorial, Berlin #2