Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center

The situation

The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center in Kyiv needed a system to catalog its archive, including documents and transcripts in more than one language. The Blavatnik Archive Foundation donated the collections management system we had built for the foundation, and the Center asked us to set it up and adapt it.

What we did

• Set up the system and its infrastructure on Amazon Web Services.
• Created user accounts and the catalog structure for the Center's collections.
• Held requirements meetings with the Center's staff.
• Mapped the Center's catalog to the system's data model: formats and types, publication status, collections, linked people and organizations, dates, places, subjects and archival fund details.
• Customized the system for transcripts in the original language and in translation.

We did not build the Center's public website.

Why it matters

A collections management system built for one archive can serve another. The Center started from a working system and adapted it to its own records, instead of building one from nothing.

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