Since making its holdings accessible to the public in 2007, the Arolsen Archives are committed to openness and transparency. Under the directorate of Rebecca Boehling and Floriane Azoulay, the institution has taken steps towards the mass online publication of its collections and accumulated metadata based on the understanding that the documents held at the Arolsen Archives are a treasure trove for researchers, as well as being the main source of information on personal and family history for many people of various nationalities and denominations around the world.
While in the past, the Arolsen Archives waited for people to request information, they now understand their role as being to supply this even to those who are not aware of its existence. The ultimate goal of the institution is to make publically available as much information as is legally and ethically possible, thus reducing the need for mediation between the Arolsen Archives and the public.
While the Arolsen Archives have already published 14 million documents from its holdings, there are still many challenges which stand in the way of our vision for full online accessibility:
- Digital indexing: Only a relatively small part of our collections is digitally indexed. While personal documents such as the CM/1 files are well indexed, list material is not. The CNI is analog and extremely complex and cannot be understood by casual users. The Arolsen Archives are striving to index more and more names using OCR as well as external cooperation with companies and institutions, such as Ancestry, The German Historic Institute in Moscow, and the JDC Archives.
- Ethics: The Arolsen Archives contain a multitude of extremely sensitive documentation, such as detailed medical files, detailed case files concerning the tracing of children, birth certificates, and information concerning criminal records. The Arolsen Archives have to identify the documentation it cannot publish as well as being flexible and capable of swiftly blocking documents at the request of relatives, while making the metadata available
- Archival laws: The Arolsen Archives, similar to Yad Vashem and the USHHM, are a collecting archive – in addition to originals, they hold millions of copies from various archives. They have to identify these, clear the issue of usage rights, and strive to renegotiate restrictive agreements in order to publish as much documentation as possible.
The Arolsen Archives Online
The new Arolsen online archive was launched in May 2019. It dramatically expands the amount of documents and metadata available online. It was realized in cooperation with one of the Arolsen Archives’ most important partners, Yad Vashem, whose strong IT department adjusted the online platform for Yad Vashem’s own databases to meet the needs of the Arolsen Archives.
The online archive currently displays about 17 million documents and includes more than 13 million names, mainly of concentration camp prisoners and DPs. In addition, it also contains the complete archival descriptions of our collections. The online archive is modular and easy to expand.