200,000 pages digitised thus farCSMC and National Library of Israel Collaborate on Ambitious Digitisation Project
4 April 2022
Photo: National Library of Israel / CSMC
The National Library of Israel houses the written estates of many important German-Jewish personalities. In a joint project, CSMC and NLI are making 24 of these historical archives digitally accessible.
The Cluster of Excellence 'Understanding Written Artefacts' at CSMC and the National Library of Israel (NLI) have launched an extensive joint project to digitise the written estates of important German-Jewish personalities from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The 24 archives and collections, which include, among others, the estates of the influential religious philosophers Martin Buber and Gerschom Scholem and the writer Oskar Baum, will be made accessible as part of the Research Field ‘Archiving Artefacts’.
A quick glance at the numbers reveals the scope of this project: Around 780,000 pages, which together fill more than 120 metres on the shelves, have to be scanned. Since the beginning of the digitisation work, which had to be postponed due to the pandemic but has since progressed as planned, about a quarter of this amount has been completed.
Scientific investigations of part of the digitised material will be carried out at the Cluster of Excellence in the context of the project ‘Wandering Artefacts: The Materialistic History of German-Jewish Archives’, which is led by Giuseppe Veltri.