Context for Jewish Content: Overhauling Judaica Europeana, the Jewish Heritage Network

Judaica Europeana, the Jewish Heritage Network, associates more than 30 partners, including among them some of the largest holders of Jewish content. Now a new infrastructure for aggregating Jewish content is being established based on the latest developments in Europeana and the Digital Public Library of America.

The network is establishing Working Groups (WG) to steer its activities and possibly including: Best practices for going digital. Business development for memory institutions in the digital age; Audience development and social networking; Exhibitions and digital storytelling; Citizen science and volunteer management.

The enrichment of the contextual description of the aggregated content is a critical challenge for the JE network. In the field of Jewish culture and history, like any other field of the humanities, access to primary and secondary sources and knowledge about the relations between these sources and the concepts of the fields are key to develop a deep understanding of the field and the basis for successful scholarly work. They cannot be used when they are separated from each other and from the primary and secondary literature. This requires the identification of suitable controlled vocabularies and encyclopedias; their publication in a suitable format (Linked Data); and the actual enrichment of the objects descriptions (metadata) or the texts themselves through a process of named entity recognition.