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(Washington, DC & Baltimore, MD) – Project
MUSE, a division of Johns Hopkins University Press, in collaboration with
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, announces today a new
landmark in the Museum’s longstanding Encyclopedia of
Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 (ECG) series: ECG volumes I-IV are now fully
searchable, open access digital publications freely available to everyone
around the world.
The most comprehensive resource on Nazi persecutory sites,
the ECG
offers users the ability to dynamically engage with empirically grounded
research that documents thousands of camps, ghettos, and other sites of
persecution operated by the Nazis and their allies.
Work on the multi-volume encyclopedia stretches back over
twenty-five years and involves the work of over 700 scholars in the
fields of history, Holocaust Studies, and other related disciplines. To
date, this global scholarly collaboration has documented evidence of
thousands of camps and ghettos.
Project MUSE and the United States Holocaust Memorial
Museum are committed to broadening access to and increasing engagement
with this vital scholarship. This new digital format will be an
invaluable resource for wide-ranging audiences, including scholars,
researchers, Holocaust survivors and their descendants, digital
humanists, educators, students, librarians, archivists, nonprofits, and
the general public. Users will gain straightforward access to extensive
bibliographic citations comprising research in more than a dozen
languages and varied source bases, including material in hundreds of
archival collections, survivor and eyewitness testimonies, memoirs,
diaries, memory books, and up-to-date scholarship. Users can navigate to
the text of the ECG
through a new interactive map
that demonstrates the vast scale of this network of Nazi-era persecution.
“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has been
working on this foundational encyclopedia for decades. The move to open
access will ensure that this resource reaches scholars, researchers, and
wider audiences wherever they are, thereby bringing new people into the
conversation about the topic,” said Dr. Lisa Leff, Director of the Jack, Joseph and
Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States
Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The first four
volumes of this seven-volume collection will be available in the new
fully searchable, digital format beginning May 8th. Content in the
remaining three volumes will be published online as it is available. In
addition to the remaining volumes, newly updated content that
incorporates previously inaccessible and undiscovered sources will
continuously be added to the ECG.
The ability to filter and search within and across volumes
is a key component of the resource that empowers scholars to see the big
picture of this research and make connections between entries.
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