by Eben English and Ralph Pugh, IIT.

The Paul V. Galvin Library http://www.gl.iit.edu at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) has committed and coordinated significant resources to the creation and development of its “Voices of the Holocaust” website http://voices.iit.edu. The site centers on  audio interviews conducted in European displaced persons camps in 1946 by Illinois Institute of Technology psychology professor David P. Boder (1886-1961). 

Beginning in 2000 with an initial web site of Boder’s own translation of 70 of the then-identified 109 interviews, the site is now being transformed into a comprehensive rendition of all Boder’s interviews.  This includes original-language transcriptions and English translations of all the interviews; audio files of all the interviews; advanced search capabilities on the topics and entities identified in the interviews; and critical content (lists, glossaries, maps) to provide contextual information.

Lead by Dean of Libraries, Christopher Stewart,  who has worked on the project since its inception in 1998, the latest work involved significant public and private fundraising, including LSTA grants received in FY 2007 and 2009.  Stewart involved Reference and Digital Services Librarian Eben English and Assistant University Archivist Ralph Pugh.  Together, this team has tackled numerous challenges, including the hiring of a small army of audio technicians, translators, and web designers, for the creation of a versatile site that will accommodate students and researchers on all levels.

The need for quality information resources regarding the Holocaust is greater than ever. In August 2005, the Illinois Legislature signed House Bill 312 into law, expanding Holocaust and genocide education for Illinois elementary and high school students. This was timely, for in December 2005 Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad publicly questioned the occurrence of the Holocaust. These events underscore the importance of the Boder interviews as a primary source for Holocaust education.

In July 1946 Dr. Boder traveled to war-torn Europe to record the stories of Holocaust survivors in their own words. He visited refugee camps in France, Switzerland, Italy, and Germany, interviewing persons from all walks of life who survived the oppression and brutality of the Nazi regime. Using a portable recording device and 200 spools of steel wire, he recorded over 90 hours of material. This portable wire recorder, which had been invented some years previously by Marvin Camras of IIT’s Armour Research Foundation, became the medium through which the actual voices of these survivors could be preserved and reproduced for an American public that had little knowledge of the events of the Holocaust.

The wire spools were among the earliest known recordings of oral histories of one of the most cataclysmic events of the 20th century and are a significant resource for understanding the history of that time.  As Boder stated at the time, though ample photography of the Nazi death camps could be had, the voices of the survivors was lacking; he proposed that the IIT-created wire recorder could serve as the survivors’ own Ernie Pyle, referencing a then-famous war correspondent.

The project began in 1998 with the discovery of IIT’s copy of transcripts that Boder had produced of most but not all of his 1946 interviews.  In 1999 Galvin Library paid for a Digital Audio Tape (DAT) copy set of all the Boder wire recordings held by the Library of Congress, which were themselves copies provided by Boder; the original wires have since been lost.  Because of the multiple generations of audio transfer involved, as well as the challenging field conditions under which Boder made his recordings, the quality of much of the audio material proved to be disappointing.  There was excessive amounts of static, distortion, hum, and other surface noise making the voices difficult to understand, and in some cases, completely unintelligible.

In the initial 2000 version of the web site the Galvin Library staff was only able to convert 16 of the interviews into a streaming format suitable for presentation over the Web though it did reproduce all 70 of Boder’s translations.  Though path-breaking at the time, the website soon became outdated technologically and also revealed how much work remained in translating and transcribing Boder’s 1946 interviews.

An LSTA grant in the amount of $9600 was awarded in 2006 to provide funds for further audio restoration. That funding allowed for the restoration of audio content for 16 more interviews. In 2007, Galvin Library used its own funds to have all of the DAT tapes converted into .WAV files, a much more stable and reliable file format. It was during this conversion process and the subsequent efforts by the project team to perform an exhaustive inventory of the recorded material which led to the exciting discovery of 10 previously uncatalogued interviews. This revelation brings the total number of interviews to 119. No record of these interviews exist in the collections of Boder’s notes and papers, nor are they listed in the Library of Congress’s catalog of the Boder material. The content of these interviews was completely unknown.

The focus of the second LSTA grant project was to create a new online interface to the Boder interviews, with features that allow for more meaningful interaction with the text and audio content. The repurposing process gives visitors to the site new ways of searching, browsing, and interacting with the material, providing a deeper understanding of the context and significance of the interviews.

When completed, site features will include:

• Text for all 119 interviews, including transcriptions in the original interview language(s) and English translations.
• Audio for all 119 interviews. For the first time, users will be able to listen to these stories as told by the Holocaust survivors, as recorded while their memories of their experiences were still fresh.
• Synchronized text and audio. This essential feature will allow users to follow along with the interview text (in its original language or English translation) while listening to the audio.
• Ability to browse interviews by biographical and historical facets. Users will be able to view subsets of the collection based on the interviewee’s religion, ethnicity, citizenship, gender, age, birthplace, what camps they were interned at, and other relevant biographical features. Users will also be able to view the list of interviews arranged in chronological order, or by location, or by language. All of these values may be combined into more sophisticated queries to produce subsets of specific interest to the user.
• Full-text searching of interview transcripts. In addition to basic keyword searches, the site will also offer advanced searching, allowing users to limit their search to words spoken by Boder or an interviewee, or words spoken in a specific language.
• Interactive maps. This site will also offer the ability to visually interact with the interviews through dynamic, clickable maps. When users click on a marked location on a map, a list of corresponding interviews (with links to the text and audio) will appear.
• Critical content and commentary. While the interviews are a powerful primary source for learning about the Holocaust, users must realize that they are subjective retellings of the events, and that memory is not always 100% accurate. Each interview will feature a critical introduction which will place the experiences narrated by the interviewee within the larger context of the Holocaust. The site will also feature a biography of Dr. Boder, and an annotated bibliography and web-liography.

There will be a launch of the revamped Voices of the Holocaust website later this summer. This site is, and will continue to be, the only online medium through which the voices captured by Boder’s recordings are given the opportunity to speak to the world.

For more information about the Voices of the Holocaust project, contact Eben English at englishe@iit.edu or Ralph Pugh at pugh@iit.edu.

Published June 17, 2009 in vol. 3, iss. 12 [View]