About Our Search Portal

Welcome to the search portal for the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections project.

It’s a work in progress.

As if our core project mission of digitizing millions of pages of documents and books in four different locations wasn’t ambitious enough, we’ve also set ourselves the goal of creating an innovative search tool that will make our data more “discoverable” (searchable) than almost any other library/archives database in the world.

What does this mean exactly?

We’ve put together different kinds of records – descriptions of books and descriptions of boxes of archival documents – into one database. This isn’t unique. What’s unusual is that in our website you’ll not only get search results for archival documents at the level of a finding aid (inventory to a collection) but also individual folders from that collection. 

We are continuing to make improvements to how the website works, in order to make it as useful as possible as a research tool. For instance, in 2019, we implemented a concordance to make it possible to get complete search results for proper names even if you type in variant spelling.