The Learning Curve in Sharing Data with the EHRI Project: The Example of a Memorial Site, Kazerne Dossin, Mechelen

Kazerne Dossin – Memorial, Museum and Documentation Centre on Holocaust and Human Rights opened its doors on 1st December 2012. The institute inherited its archival collections from its predecessor, the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance (JMDR). The JMDR had been inaugurated in 1995 at the former SS-Sammellager Mecheln, better known as the Dossin barracks, in Belgium. Between the summer of 1942 and 1944 over 25,500 Jews, Roma and Sinti were deported from here to concentration camps in the East, mostly to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

From the mid-1990s onwards the JMDR collected archival materials on the Holocaust in Belgium. The way in which these were catalogued and made available to the public changed dramatically when Kazerne Dossin and EHRI became partners in sharing (meta)data with a broader audience. Using the example of the Lewkowicz family collection (unique, persistent identifier KD_00404) this learning resource focuses on the evolution Kazerne Dossin went through while standardizing descriptions, and on the tools EHRI provided to optimize the workflow for collection holding institutes, a process from which Kazerne Dossin benefited as a test case.

This learning resource demonstrates how working with EHRI has changed the archival management processes in Kazerne Dossin, and what benefits that may also have for other collections and archives.

#Learning outcomes

After viewing this training resource, users will be able to:

• understand how archives and memorial sites like Kazerne Dossin can share their metadata with aggregators such as EHRI and, in doing so, improve their own archival management processes
• appreciate and use the tools that EHRI provides to optimise workflows for collection holding institutes