Hello!
I frequently help digitalizing documents, although more recently, I rarely log in; so it does not show in my profile. And I’ve got a question:
Frequently, there are challenges for digitalizing prisoner registration cards. However, the Nazis did not document those who they murdered immediately upon arrival, did they? Wouldn’t it be good for this reason to also digitalize transport lists? I mean, for those seeking information about a particular relative’s fate, it would be too difficult to read all those lists. Manually checking whether a name shows up in the registration cards seems easier…
Best regards,
Sonnenblume / Sunflower
Hi, I can see your point.
Probably thousands of documents are still waiting to be digitized, among them numerous lists of all kinds.
As far as I understand, there are two Arolsen databases and not all data processed so far are publicly accessibly at the time being. So I don’t know to what extent nominal lists have already been linked to the respective prisoners (like for example the Dachau entry register and the nominal roles with DPs already are). In the former zooniverse ENC volunteers processed many lists as well.
I personally suspect it will take many years (generations?) to record all the data left by the NS terror regime.
The Arolsen Mauthausen files alone contain thousands of documents, including many nominal lists
[quote, introduction] „The documents contained in the list material record more than one name or prisoner number and therefore each relate to more than one prisoner. Lists exist for the transport and arrival of prisoners, the administration of the clothing and possessions they brought with them (personal effects), the assignment of prisoners to forced labor, the punishment of prisoners in the camps, the medical treatment of prisoners in the infirmaries, the release, and the decease or survival of prisoners.“
Maybe your comment will inspire the Arolsen team to set up another list workflow some day?
Have a good week!
Hello Sunflower,
thank you for your support!
We still have a lot of documents in various forms that need to be indexed. The participants from everynamecounts are an incredibly great help. We are also testing AI-supported solutions.
Transport lists often have a uniform structure and are more difficult to capture manually in terms of format. That’s why we try to work with automated processes such as OCR.
At everynamecounts, we are currently concentrating on individual documents, which often provide a more direct insight into the fate of individual people.
This is an interesting article on the subject: Digital memorial to the victims of Nazism: AI helps reconstruct individual fates - Arolsen Archives.
Best regards,
Mareike
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Hello Mareike,
thank you very much for the link. Okay, if AI already does make processing lists that much easier, then giving them to us volunteers might be a waste of our time. I do know the bad quality that OCR alone delivers; that would not work for a documentation project like this.
By the way, out of curiosity: What is the percentage of everynamecounts documents that have to be looked at by the team afterwards (i.e., where at least one of the three volunteers typed in something different than the other two)?
Best regards,
Sunflower