Digital libraries: Google digitizes Holocaust historical data

The world's largest collection of Holocaust documents is going digital. Israel's Holocaust memorial, Yad Vashem, is teaming up with Google to make its photographs and documents interactive and searchable on the Internet.

The project launched on January 26 2011 with a collection of 130,000 photos that can now be searched directly from Google, using standard keywords and other data that make it far easier than in the past to find the desired information.

The collection is expected to expand to other parts of the memorial's vast archives in the future.

A social network-like component allows viewers to contribute to the project by adding their own stories, comments and documents about family members who appear in the online archives.

"This is part of our vision - to connect Yad Vashem's knowledge and information to modern technology, and bring it to youngsters," said Avner Shalev, Yad Vashem Chairman.

Google used experimental optical character recognition technology to make text within documents and photos searchable in multiple languages.

Yad Vashem's next priority is to digitize its collection of survivor testimonies.

The launch comes a day before the U.N. marks its annual Holocaust remembrance day.