Recording history is just one use of indexing data, but it is a pretty important one. Seventy years after World War II and the Holocaust, contributors around the globe are indexing victims’ names through an online memorial that recently hit the 1 million mark in number of names. This interesting information came to us from USA Today in their article, “Online database of Holocaust victims hits 1 million records.”
World Memory Project is a collaboration between the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and genealogy website Ancestry. It is a free online database that lists information about millions of victims and survivors of the Holocaust and was originally launched in May 2011.
This major milestone was made possible through over 3,500 volunteers from 18 different countries spending hundreds of hours indexing archived documents from the Holocaust Museum into an online software provided by Ancestry. Thousands of people have accessed the database to find information about their ancestors since it started.
With any indexing project, it is important to remember the value of a solid taxonomy. How the content is classified impacts the findability of your data. Professionals should look for an experienced builder of solid standards-based taxonomies to associate content for appropriate machine-assisted indexing. Access Innovations can provide solutions that are ANSI compliant.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
