Identifying, Matching and Interlinking Personal Data across Diverse Systems
A Blueprint for Research and Memory Tools on Nazi Persecution
Personal data has a unique importance in our field – the Nazis intended to erase any trace of those who they saw as subhuman and superfluous. Thus, the personal data collected and made accessible online in countless web-archives, memorial books or other applications from various institutions and initiatives is much more than a “finding aid” for (genealogical) research – it is a manifestation of the will to remember and to offset the dehumanization of the victims.
In recent years, the information accessible in the Internet on Nazi-crimes and on the Holocaust has dramatically increased, but the data is scattered and still not interlinked—and for this reason, is often hard to find. One of the biggest problems in interlinking data is to properly identify which information belongs together.
In order to make a first step in filling this gap, Tracing the Past, Arolsen Archives and the City of Munich are cooperating in a project which aims to address the issue of truly sharing and interlinking information on victims of the Nazi Regime on an automated basis, and to hence enable users by offering them easy access on the web to the available information on Nazi victims.
The first results were presented at the international conference Nazi Persecution – Person Data and Data Standards. A Conference for Researchers, Archive and Database Specialists Connected to Memorial Sites, on 29-31 October 2024 at the Leibniz Institute for Contemporary History Munich (IfZ) and the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. The results will also be published soon.
How We Proceeded
As an initial step, we automatically matched the well-researched names of Holocaust victims from Munich (www.gedenkbuch.muenchen.de) with the indexed documents of the vast database at Arolsen Archives (https://collections.arolsen-archives.org) and the dataset of Mapping the Lives (www.mappingthelives.org) by using a carefully developed methodology that we published at https://github.com/TracingThePast/automatic_matching. We then integrated links to the documents in Arolsen and to the Munich Memorial Book into the datasets of the relevant persons at Mapping the Lives. Now for the first time, users get access to all these sources in a compact and time-saving way by using one single application.
Phase 2
In a second step, we will hardwire the personal data in all three databases by creating and implementing unique identifiers, enabling not only linking, but also an automated update each time that new information and documents are added to the databases. Time will tell which Authority File will be used to administer the information.
In the near future, links to the other applications will also be integrated vice versa at the Arolsen Archives online and the Munich Memorial Book, establishing truly interlinked online-databases on the victims of the Nazi persecution.
Join the Project
By demonstrating the opportunities of cross-linked databases for both research and commemoration, we want to inspire others to put more effort into not only gathering information, but also into enabling crosslinks between their projects and others. Contact us if you are interested in becoming part of a bigger network by sending an email to cooperation@tracingthepast.org