Founded in 1933, The Wiener Holocaust Library is the world’s oldest – and Britain’s largest – institution dedicated to studying and remembering the Holocaust.
With a collection of over one million items, the Library remains one of the world’s leading Holocaust education institutions.
Image from the Wiener Holocaust Library’s website.
"Humap has provided a way to more effectively present our archival and audio-visual material, in a compelling format that draws out their context and relevancy today."
In 2021, the Wiener Holocaust Library was awarded a grant by Arts Council England to fund the creation of a new interactive map.
The original map (left) had been launched in 2015, imagined as a basic visual aid. Despite its wealth of knowledge, the map was not visited by many users and did not garner much attention from the press or the public.
The Library reimagined the Refugee Map as a fully interactive, immersive, and multimedia experience.
Image from Mapping the Archive: The Wiener Holocaust Library’s Refugee Map by Helen Lewandowski
“This map helps people reconnect with their scattered pasts.”
The reimagined Refugee Map launched on the Humap platform in November 2021. The launch of the map was covered in the Londonist, EHRI, BBC News London, Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, BBC History Revealed and Jewish News.
It currently contains 470 Records, 109 Collections, 15 Journeys and 118 Overlays.
Since launch, the updated Refugee Map has been the subject of “Archival Cartography”, a hybrid event between the Wiener and the LivingMaps Network, and the inspiration for Mapping Memories – both the travelling exhibition and the symposium: “Mapping Migration and the challenges of Digital Curation.”
Want to know more about the map-making process? Helen Lewandowski, Assistant Curator and Project Leader for the map, has a fantastic blog article on the curation of the Refugee Map.
"Our old interactive map webpage had become antiquated and technically too constrained to effectively tell the stories within our collections to a wider audience. Humap solved this in style, with a fresh look and intuitive platform that, we hope, will improve longevity of the resource and accessibility to our unique archival collections in the long term."
Humap turns huge amounts of information into bitesized, multimedia slices of content. Every record can easily be shared and can contain a call to action that invites the reader to explore further, in this case, to dive into the Library’s catalogue.
This empowers the Refugee Map to emphasise individual human stories while emphasising the size and scope of the Holocaust.. The thoughtful and beautiful curation efforts of the Library team have created a visually appealing and extremely intuitive digital resource.
Humap also removes the burden of hosting and maintenance. The Library is free to digitise and distribute their collections without the time and fiscal cost associated with building, user-testing, and maintaining a dedicated platform.
Want to know more about Humap for cultural heritage? Check out our use case page.
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