Do Research Online

While most of the materials in YIVO’s Archive & Library have not yet been digitized and put online, there are a number of online resources already available to assist you in your research.

• Online Catalogs of What’s Available in the Archives & Library
• Digitized Books & Periodicals
• Digital Images
• Online Film Footage & Sound Recordings
• Other Online Research Resources

Online Catalogs of What’s Available in the Archives & Library

Most of the holdings of the YIVO Library are cataloged in the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) of the Center for Jewish History. 

Descriptions of most of the over 1,900 record groups of the YIVO Archives are available in the Guide to the YIVO Archives. There are also more detailed finding aids (guides to the collections) for a growing number of the collections.

The Guide to the YIVO Archives also has catalogs (but no digital images yet) for 5 collections in the Photo Archive:

• Holocaust photographs
• Yiddish theater photographs
• Postcards (RG 122)
• Territorial Photo Collection – U.S. (RG 120)
• Photos by Alter Kacyzne (RG 1270)

A list of landsmanshaftn collections in the YIVO Archives is available on the website of the Jewish Genealogical Society of New York.

Digitized Books & Periodicals

Thousands of books and periodicals from the YIVO Library can be accessed in their entirety at:

• yivolibrarybooks.org (Rare books and scholarly journals)
• archive.org/details/yivoinstitutelibrary (Yiddish plays and operettas)
• childrenslibrary.org (Yiddish children’s books)

Digital Images

Digital images of photographs, books, posters, artwork, and documents from the YIVO Archives and Library can be found on the following websites:

• YIVO Digital Archive on Jewish Life in Poland
  Access to over 50 archival collections with Polish materials, including finding aids, digital images, sound recordings, and rare films of Jewish life in pre-WWII Poland.
• People of A Thousand Towns: Online Photographic Catalog
  Search and view over 50,000 images of Jewish life in pre-WWII Eastern Europe.
• Milstein Family Jewish Communal Archive Project
  View documents and images from YIVO's collection of organizational records for the 92nd St Y, the Educational Alliance, the New York Association for New Americans (NYANA), FEGs, and Surprise Lake Camp.
• YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe
  The world's most comprehensive resource on Eastern European Jewish history and culture and over 1,000 digitized images, documents, sound clips, and videos from the collections of YIVO and other libraries and museums around the world. 

See also featured items from our collections in the exhibitions in Digital YIVO and selected images from YIVO’s collections in the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) of the Center for Jewish History. 

Coming soon: Digital images from YIVO’s collections will soon appear in the databases of Judaica Europeana and Digital Public Library of America. In addition, in 2015, YIVO began the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project, an international initiative to digitize over 11,000 books and over 1.5 million pages of documents from its original, prewar Vilna collections.

Online Film Footage & Sound Recordings

Many of YIVO’s amateur films of prewar Jewish communities in Poland and Lithuania can be seen on the following websites:

• 16mm Postcards: Home Movies of American Jewish Visitors to 1930s Poland
  Rare films of Jewish life in prewar Eastern Europe on an online exhibition by YIVO and Yeshiva University Museum.
• YIVO Digital Archive on Jewish Life in Poland
  Rare films of Jewish life in prewar Poland and samples of music and spoken word recordings from the YIVO Sound Archive.
• YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe
  Excerpts from films in the YIVO Film Archive and samples of music and spoken word recordings from the YIVO Sound Archive.

Other Online Research Resources

See other resources in the Research Resources section.