Holocaust Centre North in Huddersfield, west Yorkshire, has launched a new digital archive of 70 collections of papers and personal testimonies from Holocaust survivors and refugees.

The archive is the first phase of an ambitious three-year project, Homeward Bound, by the museum to catalogue its extensive Holocaust collection and make it accessible online.

The new archive can be accessed remotely via the National Archives website, opening up the centre’s collections to anyone with an interest in Holocaust history, such as academics, artists, schools, researchers and survivors’ families.

In a statement, the institution said: “Following months of painstaking work for the centre’s archivist, this groundbreaking and transformative service enables global public online access to its collections and supports the centre’s strategy to becoming a world-class destination for Holocaust education and research.”

The statement added: “Not only is this level of access and depth of information invaluable for worldwide Holocaust education, this cataloguing has also greatly benefitted the centre’s own staff. 

Through complete immersion in its records, collections and learning staff have gained a far greater understanding and increased knowledge of its collection, its stories and the survivors themselves.”

The cataloguing process helped to uncover previously unknown connections and stories in the collections.

You can read more in an article by Geraldine Kendall Adams published in the museumsassociation.org web site at: http://bit.ly/3JJ75Bl.