Digitizing a minority and its history : A study in accessibility and digitization in Jewish cultural heritage collections and Holocaust memory

Abstract: For the last thirty years Swedish institutions, both on governmental and foundational level, have seeked to illuminate the horrors of the Holocaust and antisemitism. A part in this was collection of testimonies from survivors of the Holocaust as to save first-hand accounts from an aging population of survivors. In the middle ground between making said collections accessible and protecting the materials from potential racist and antisemitic attacks, sometimes collections were deemed too vulnerable to be made fully available which has put substantial accounts from the Holocaust behind protective barriers, figuratively speaking. A recent effort of once again intending to bring the Holocaust to the table, the newly established Swedish Holocaust Museum must deal with similar considerations of accessibility versus vulnerability. An aspect that was not as prevalent thirty years ago was digitization of cultural heritage or society in general. This practice of dealing with cultural heritage comes with its own set of considerations – Something that has been discussed in this study.  With a starting point in the Swedish Holocaust Museum, digitization of collections dealing with either Jewish cultural heritage or Holocaust memory has been the focus in this study. Other than the Swedish Holocaust Museum, the Nordic Museum, Uppsala University Library and the Jewish Library has been surveyed through interviews in trying to extract each institutions’ policies and practices regarding digitization of the abovementioned kind. To focus the study Gidlund & Sundbergs (2021) digitization as a societal arrangement was used together with Gamstorps (2020) description of Jewish history and Holocaust history as two sides of the same coin.  It was found that each institutions have limitations as to what they can digitize, be it lack of funds or regulations. In some cases, the limitations halted the digitization of the materials and other institutions tried to find solutions. The Swedish Holocaust Museum, the author argues, is placed in a unique spot in challenging current status quo in making accessible cultural heritage deemed vulnerable.