Project MUSE and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Launch New Landmark Initiative

By Project MUSE

Project MUSE, a division of Johns Hopkins University Press, in collaboration with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, announces today a new landmark in the Museum’s longstanding Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933–1945 (ECG) series: ECG volumes I-IV are now fully searchable, open access digital publications freely available to everyone around the world.

The most comprehensive resource on Nazi persecutory sites, the ECG offers users the ability to dynamically engage with empirically grounded research that documents thousands of camps, ghettos, and other sites of persecution operated by the Nazis and their allies. 

Work on the multi-volume encyclopedia stretches back over twenty-five years and involves the work of over 700 scholars in the fields of history, Holocaust Studies, and other related disciplines. To date, this global scholarly collaboration has documented evidence of thousands of camps and ghettos.

Project MUSE and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum are committed to broadening access to and increasing engagement with this vital scholarship. This new digital format will be an invaluable resource for wide-ranging audiences, including scholars, researchers, Holocaust survivors and their descendants, digital humanists, educators, students, librarians, archivists, nonprofits, and the general public. Users will gain straightforward access to extensive bibliographic citations comprising research in more than a dozen languages and varied source bases, including material in hundreds of archival collections, survivor and eyewitness testimonies, memoirs, diaries, memory books, and up-to-date scholarship. Users can navigate to the text of the ECG through a new interactive map that demonstrates the vast scale of this network of Nazi-era persecution.

“The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has been working on this foundational encyclopedia for decades. The move to open access will ensure that this resource reaches scholars, researchers, and wider audiences wherever they are, thereby bringing new people into the conversation about the topic,” said Dr. Lisa Leff, Director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  

The first four volumes of this seven-volume collection will be available in the new fully searchable, digital format beginning May 8th. Content in the remaining three volumes will be published online as it is available. In addition to the remaining volumes, newly updated content that incorporates previously inaccessible and undiscovered sources will continuously be added to the ECG.

The ability to filter and search within and across volumes is a key component of the resource that empowers scholars to see the big picture of this research and make connections between entries.