£240,000 funding grant to digitise the UK Holocaust archive
National Lottery Heritage Fund allocates support to Wiener Library to help bring vital evidence to a wider audience
The Wiener Holocaust Library has received a £240,000 grant from The National Lottery Heritage Fund for a groundbreaking new project.
Digital Transformation: Connecting Collections and Communities aims to connect diverse communities with newly catalogued and digitised collections from the UK’s Holocaust archive of record over the next three years.
The funding has been awarded to help develop an extensive programme of engagement and education activities. These activities will improve access to educational resources, engage diverse audiences with global histories of the Holocaust, and equip educators, community groups and activists with resources highlighting historical opposition to fascism and antisemitism.
During the three years, expert staff at the Library will catalogue, digitise, and deploy collections of relevance to these pressing current concerns, including in relation to fascism and anti-fascism in Germany, Austria, and Britain; refugee histories; postwar humanitarian efforts; and the history of more recent genocides such as in Sudan.
Responding to the successful grant award, Dr Toby Simpson, director of the Library, said: “The Library has just marked its 90th anniversary as war and conflict have returned to Europe, and Israel and Palestine, amidst rising antisemitism in Britain, and crises around the globe leading to abuses of human rights and the suffering of displaced populations. These difficult developments underline the continuing contemporary relevance of the Library’s archival holdings and mission.
“Faced with deep fakes and online radicalisation, capacity to combat disinformation with documentary evidence is fundamental. Thanks to National Lottery players, the Library’s archival collections will now play a more crucial role than ever before: by engaging teachers, educators, students and the wider public with authoritative digital resources.”
The Wiener Holocaust Library is the world’s oldest and Britain’s largest collection of original archival material on pre-war Jewish life, the Nazi era and the Holocaust.
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