New York

Work on the Vilna Collections at YIVO in New York is slated to take place over the course of 7 years.

The books and documents have been consulted by numerous scholars in the 68 years since they were rescued and brought to New York after World War II. [Download a PDF of works based on materials in the Vilna Collections.] The books have been cataloged and most of the documents arranged into 61 record groups, according to accepted library and archival standards.

Our team of archivists is carefully checking the contents of each record group, refining the organization of the materials, identifying items that need conservation,  adding in uncataloged materials, and preparing instructions for the digital technicians. They create finding aids with historical notes about the materials and detailed lists of what is in each folder. Our project librarian is double-checking the catalog records for books and preparing bibliographic data to be included in the data for each book’s digital image file.

Our conservation team cleans, flattens, and repairs pages of both documents and books so that they can be stabilized and digitized. The archivists replace old folders and boxes with new, acid-free folders and boxes to permanently preserve the rare materials.

Books and documents are digitized in-house at YIVO by two shifts of scanning technicians from Smooth Solutions, Inc. After each batch is scanned it goes through rigorous quality assurance (QA) inspection by both Smooth Solutions and YIVO QA archivists and librarians. Contrast, image quality, orientation, and legibility are checked as well as completeness of the digital record.

Digital masters are stored on a staging server and routinely backed up and checked for digital integrity by our project manager.

Additional metadata necessary for display on the Internet is created by YIVO’s project librarian and by digital librarians of the Center for Jewish History. The images and finding aids are ingested in the digital assets management system of the Center for Jewish History (of which YIVO is a founding partner), and routinely backed up in the cloud.