In this article we present our ideas for an integrating activity for archival research on the Holocaust. We analyse how we can improve Holocaustrelated collection descriptions for research, which we will make available online, and how EHRI provides travel grants for transnational access to existing infrastructures in Holocaust research. Both approaches help us overcome that Holocaust-related material is geographically dispersed and address the challenges for historical research stemming from the way documentation on the Holocaust has been attempted up to now.We have chosen to implement the EHRI integrated information resource using graph databases. With their emphasis on relationships, graph databases are particularly well suited for historical research in particular and humanities research in general. We analyse the architecture and implementation details of this novel approach and show how graph databases integrate with traditional ways of searching and browsing historical collections. This way, we support more advanced means of access to facts in the documents and enable deep semantically meaningful access to the documents. The innovation of EHRI lies in the combination of digital and non-digital means to integrate existing infrastructures. We believe this might be a model for many related research activities in the humanities.

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Over the course of the last century there have been significant changes in the practices of archives driven by the massive increase in the volume of records for archiving, a larger and more diverse user base, and the digital turn. This paper analyses work undertaken by the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure project (EHRI) to develop heritage archives into research infrastructures by connecting their knowledge and making it relevant for research. In the paper, we focus on EHRI's work on an integrated collection portal; acting as a central gateway to the rich information on Holocaust-related sources. At the time of writing, the portal contains over 150,000 descriptions of over 1,850 institutions that hold Holocaust-related archival material in 51 countries. In addition, it hosts concise reports that provide in-depth per-country information about the Holocaust history and archival situation in 47 countries, topic-focused research guides, and a range of other services. The paper presents how the EHRI portal work connects to the state-of-the-art of heritage portals and the novel solutions we had to develop to align the portal with the requirements of a research infrastructure. INTRODUCTION -FROM THE MILK CAN TO THE EHRI PORTALIn 1940 in the Warsaw Ghetto the historian Emanuel Ringelblum established a secret archive, code named Oneg Shabbat.1 He engaged 50-60 people who contributed descriptions of events on a regular basis and wrote reports on different aspects of daily life in the ghetto. Emanuel Ringelblum was a professionally trained historian, but he worked closely together with people from different backgrounds. The majority of the participants, called "fighter-historians" by Levi [1988], were teachers, writers and economists, but they were also joined by a number of workers and craftsmen. Ringelblum and his team collected documents (diaries, drawings, songs, newspaper clippings, etc.) illustrating the victims' experience; or as Primo Levi wrote "how the ghetto lived and died day by day" [Levi 1988]. In 1942 and 1943, they buried the underground archive in three different hiding places in metal boxes and milk cans in and close by the ghetto. Two parts of the underground archive were dug up after the war.This brief story about Oneg Shabbat underlines that history is not made in a laboratory, but tells the story of events in the real world. Holocaust studies -although it was not yet called that way at the time -did not start within the walls of a university. The story also shows that early research on the Holocaust engaged a wide range of experts and colleagues. Ringelblum brought this diverse group together not just because the difficulties of the ghetto demanded it, but also because the subject required the input from several disciplines. Holocaust research has remained an interdisciplinary challenge and it has never become an exclusively academic undertaking.The need for broad engagement with the public as well as the requirement to bring together different types of expertise are clearly reflected in th...

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