Google Helps Digitize Holocaust Archives

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In honor of UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day tomorrow, Google is partnering with Jerusalem-based Holocaust museum Yad Vashem in bringing 130,000 photos and documents to the Internet, where they will be organized and stored in Google’s cloud.

The search engine giant has been working for three years with the museum to index all the documents using optical character recognition technology (OCR), which will make everything from visas to survivor testimonials searchable. That way, anyone looking for information on a relative will now be able to see photos and other documents from the archives in their Google search.

“This is part of our vision–to connect Yad Vashem’s knowledge and information to modern technology, and bring it to youngsters,” Yad Vashem Avner Shalev told NPR.

While there are 130,000 photos and documents now at your fingertips, this is still only the beginning of the project, as Google and Yad Vashem plan to work together throughout the coming years to continue adding to the archive.

As Google wrote on its official blog, the Yad Vashem project is a part of the company’s growing effort to create digital archives of cultural and historical collections. Google has already done so for the Prado Museum in Madrid, LIFE and some major European libraries.

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