The St. Louis Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum, the nearest Holocaust museum to Kansas City, recently received a Museums for America grant to help fund the digital preservation of its collection.
The Midwest Center for Holocaust Education in Kansas City is also in the process of digitizing a paper archival collection.
The $224,492 Museums for America grant for the St. Louis Holocaust Museum comes from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the main government agency for federal support for libraries and museums. The grant will go toward the $500,000 digitization project, The Power of Holocaust Testimony.
According to the grant, “Museum staff and project volunteers will establish a digital asset management system to ingest the material and use metadata to connect topics, events, and individuals across artifacts and recordings. As a result of the project, staff, scholars, and researchers will have access to previously inaccessible primary source material on a free and publicly accessible website.”
All the digitized content will be available publicly on the St. Louis Holocaust Museum’s website. Many oral histories and video testimonies are available currently on the website’s “Survivor Stories” page, but The St. Louis Jewish Light reports that hundreds of survivors and liberators gave photographs, written documents/letters and other items to the museum that have not yet been digitized.
The local Midwest Center for Holocaust Education (MCHE), meanwhile, has the Witnesses to the Holocaust Archive, consisting of testimonies, available on its website.
“We digitized our archival collection of survivor testimonies many years ago with generous grant support. Our archive was, at the time, in outdated formats, and it was critical to convert it to preserve it,” said Jessica Rockhold, executive director of MCHE.
Currently, MCHE is working on digitizing a paper archival collection, the New Americans Archive, largely through its graduate intern program. According to Rockhold, the long-term goals are for the New Americans Archive to be fully available online and to create an online exhibit.
MCHE is an independent partner agency of the Jewish Federation of Greater Kansas City. In July, the St. Louis Holocaust museum separated from the Jewish Federation of St. Louis to become a fully independent institution, but it and the St. Louis Federation plan to continue to work together in the future.
The St. Louis Holocaust Museum is currently closed while in the process of a $25 million expansion. According to its website, the new 35,000-square-foot building will open on Nov. 2, 2022.