Adam Strohm
Director, University Archives and Special Collections
Illinois Institute of Technology
The Voices of the Holocaust project provides a portal for the exploration of digitized, restored, transcribed, and translated interviews with Holocaust survivors conducted by Dr. David P. Boder in 1946. The site, last updated in 2009, relied on Adobe Flash technology for interview playback, and was in need of an update to meet contemporary user needs, and, eventually, with the retirement of Flash, to function at all. This project briefing will detail the migration of the Voices of the Holocaust site from a php framework utilizing interlinked xml files to a combination of Islandora/Drupal with interviews hosted on the Aviary platform. The briefing will include rationale for the technology chosen for the site, as well as discussion of efforts to modernize the site’s data, including data reconciliation with authority files via Open Refine, and the implementation of linked open data. I will also discuss the challenges faced when migrating an existing site’s content and commentary with a focus on modernization and interoperability while respecting and maintaining the scholarly efforts of the site’s original builders, writers, and advisors.
voices.iit.edu
https://iit.aviaryplatform.com/collections/231 (the interviews in the Aviary platform)