Online Collection

The Online Collection serves both museum visitors and people unable to visit the museum in person by providing users with the opportunity to explore artifacts and photographs in the collection of the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. Of the more than 7,000 objects in the Online Collection, many have never been on display in the museum. The website provides the public a way to access to previously unseen artifacts in the Museum’s collection.

In order to serve the Museum’s diverse audiences, which include older visitors, a high-school age audience that is learning about the Holocaust in school, and their teachers, the focus of the interface design was ease-of-use.  The HTML interface requires only the most basic Internet connection to access. The site navigation facilitates browsing  by employing a largely visual display that leads visitors to discover objects by presenting other objects that relate to the family from which the artifact came, as well as other objects that explore similar subjects.  For example, a user who is looking at Ansjel Liberman’s wooden sculpture of a dog could see other items he carved as well as the suitcase from which his daughter Marie sold his handmade statuettes on the streets of Paris.  The user could learn about the fate of the Liberman family during the war years and explore other artifacts donated by French Jews or objects that deal with occupations held by Jews.  The website also supports complex searching through several categories including geographic locations, subjects, dates, and object types. The Online Collection also offers several ways to present the results of a search including full page images, thumbnails, and a clean tiled view.

A central challenge in the creation of this website was that in spite of each object’s ability to reveal stories of hope, struggle, and survival, as well as its rich historical value, a substantial component of the collection is neither beautiful nor eye catching.  By focusing on the stories behind each artifact and the connections between artifacts, the Online Collection offers a lens through which the Museum’s unique visitorship can find inspiration to learn about Jewish heritage and the Holocaust.

 This project is Phase 1 of an ongoing and wider-ranging project to place all of the approximately 25,000 artifacts in the collection online.  Importantly, the Online Collection offers information unavailable in the museum, such as web-only descriptions of each object.  New descriptions are constantly being written by Museum staff and posted online. The online descriptions offer a greater depth of information than is provided in the Museum. Each online description was created to stand on its own.  Whereas the objects in the museum are intended to be viewed in a particular context and juxtaposed with the other artifacts in the gallery, the online artifact texts are written to be viewed in a variety of contexts as well as independently. In the next few years visitor feedback and additional funding will lead to an expansion of the Online Collection’s capabilities to allow users to make contributions to the Museum’s online content and share their online experience with friends and family.