Against the backdrop of increasing requests for the acquisition of family-historical collections on the one hand, and growing research inquiries into individual holdings on the other, the IGdJ has successfully secured third-party funding to process its own archival collections.
The one-year archival project “Only Fragments?!” by Dr. Anna Menny, Dr. Björn Siegel, Franka Groon and Anna Holz aims to repackage selected family papers as well as materials related to the institute’s history in accordance with current conservation standards and to provide more in-depth cataloguing. These measures are intended both to improve accessibility and to ensure the long-term preservation of the sources. Particular attention is paid to the visual materials contained in the collections, which—where this has not already been done—will be incorporated into the IGdJ’s online picture database Bildarchiv jüdische geschichte & gegenwart [Jewish History & Present].
Family-historical and visual sources hold exceptional potential for research, yet they are often only fragmentarily catalogued and therefore difficult for scholars to access. Expanding the archival finding aids of the IGdJ is thus another key objective of the project. In addition, selected outstanding sources will be published in digital institute’s projects or made newly accessible via selected platforms.