Sunday, January 30, 2011 Largest Digital Archive of Holocaust Victims: Google's Holocaust collection sets world record JERUSALEM, Israel -- Around 130,000 images from the world's largest Holocaust collection have been made available online for the first time by
Google in partnership with the Yad Vashem museum in Israel
- setting the new world record for theLargest Digital Archive of Holocaust Victims.
The 130,000 pictures made available now show the faces of thousands of Jews, young and old who suffered Nazi persecution and murder before and during the Second World War.
The Guinness world record for thelargest panoramic digital photographwas 15.33 gigapixels with a total area of 3,958.5 m² (42,608.9 ft²) and was created by Michael Høeltermand of SUN-ADvertising (Denmark).
Guinness World Records also recognized thelargest photo mosaic, which measures 1360.81m² (14647.58 ft²) and contains 120,000 individual photographs. It was achieved by Misuzu san san san jikkouiinkai (Japan), in Nagato, Japan.
In all, Yad Vashem's library holds more than 130 million documents and this move, said the museum's chairman Avner Shalev, is the "first step" towards bringing the whole of the "vast" archive online.
Google's collaboration with Israel's Yad Vashem museum to create an online collection of Holocaust documents is part of a growing tend that is putting hard-to-access knowledge online, easing public access and facilitating research.
Google's experimental optical character recognition (OCR) technology, also used to translate images into digitally legible text by its Goggles application, has been employed in the digitisation project.
You can search for names in the archive. Furthermore you can add personal stories below images in the archive
A spokesman said that, "while not perfect, it will make it possible to search and find specific photographs and other documents".
