MFA student Taylor Johnson to work on CHGS collections

The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) stewards a physical collection of art and artifacts related to the Holocaust, as well as a database, the CHGS Collections on Elevator.

This summer's project is to prepare and enhance the Elevator interface and metadata, in order to present the CHGS full collections to UMN and CLA faculty as a resource for digital learning on relevant content in the Fall 2020 semester (and beyond). We hope that faculty will assign projects to their students based on the CHGS primary-source material, making connections between object entries in Elevator, creating digital (or physical) exhibitions, learning archiving and collections management work, and literally taking history into their hands. 

We will be working on connecting Holocaust survivor records to best feature the unique testimonies and artwork across the CHGS collections (e.g. our MN survivor records with Felix de la Concha’s portraits and videos of local survivors). We will match the CHGS Book collection against UMN Libraries records to subject headings into the records in Elevator, providing a basis for keyword searching and tagging.  We will fully integrate the Voice to Vision collection, and archive our YouTube lectures.  These are but a few of the important projects that are our priorities.

Taylor Johnson is an MFA graduate student in the Department of Art, minoring in Museum Studies, whose Internship at the Bell Museum in the Ornithology Lab got cut short due to Covid-19 closures. This RA-ship will help her complete the internship credits and give her valuable experience in museum work.

Alejandro Baer, Director of CHGS, sees opening our collections to faculty as a priority for the center, in pursuit of the CHGS mission.  We are excited to get this work done!