Creating and Enhancing Access to the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project

FAIN: PW-277363-21

Yiddish Book Center (Amherst, MA 01002-3375)
Christa Whitney (Project Director: July 2020 to present)

Providing access to a collection of oral history interviews about Yiddish language and culture through transcription, the creation of time-coded indices, and descriptive metadata enhancement.

The Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project seeks funding to enhance access to its digital collection of video oral histories about Yiddish language and culture in the non-ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. With this grant, we will create time-coded transcripts and bilingual indices for a large portion of our continuously growing collection, thereby increasing multilingual access to this unique archive. Additionally, we will align geographic and subject metadata to widely used formats and link the oral history collection to related digital collections at the Yiddish Book Center. Finally, we will make the archive discoverable on major scholarly search platforms and allow for integration into universal digital libraries alongside other humanities resources. These efforts enable researchers, educators, artists, and the general public to more easily access and utilize these invaluable primary source materials about the culture of an important ethnic minority in the US and beyond.

Associated Products

Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project (enhanced interview page features) (Database/Archive/Digital Edition)
Title: Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project (enhanced interview page features)
Author: Carole Renard
Author: Christa Whitney
Abstract: The award product includes searchable indices for English-language interviews, searchable bilingual indices for Yiddish-language interviews, and searchable time-coded transcriptions for English-language interviews, as well as interactive maps on each interview page.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/oral-histories
Primary URL Description: This is the landing page for the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Collection, through which users can search for specific interviews and browse interview highlights.
Secondary URL: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/collections/oral-histories/interviews/woh-fi-0001148/david-roskies-2019
Secondary URL Description: This is an example of a bilingually indexed Yiddish-language interview with the geo-mapping feature.
Access Model: Open access

Yiddish Book Center website advanced search (Web Resource)
Title: Yiddish Book Center website advanced search
Author: Amber Clooney
Abstract: The advanced search feature on the Yiddish Book Center’s website allows users to search across the Center’s various digital collections by collection, language, year, people and place names, and theme, with both English and Yiddish keyboard options.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/search
Primary URL Description: This is the link for the advanced search feature.
Secondary URL: https://www.yiddishbookcenter.org/search-guide
Secondary URL Description: This webpage offers instructions for the advanced search feature.

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