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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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The field of Holocaust studies relies on a wide variety of archives, dispersed all over the world. Identifying the right sources for a specific research question within this field is not easy or straightforward. Yet Holocaust scholars predominately focus on methodologies for source analysis rather than discovery. Archival finding aids are among the most important tools to aid primary source discovery, but have hitherto not been considered in methodological discussions on Holocaust research. In this article we will reflect on the composition of finding aids based on our work for the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI). Our premise is that the content of finding aids is determined by their authors and the context in which they are creating them. The strongest argument for this subjectivity is that our workoutlined in this article -not only indicates that descriptions of one and the same source differ, but that they can do so quite considerably, and hence can influence research. Our stance is that historians optimize their profit from finding aids by becoming more sensitive to the subjectivity and authorship of descriptions. We conclude by showing how an online environment such as the one developed by EHRI can sensitize historians and archivists to the situated and subjective nature of finding aids by accommodating a plurality of descriptive voices, and encourage them to share their knowledge and become co-authors of finding aids.

This essay revises customary interpretations of Johann Gottfried Herder that stress the non-political or anarchical nature of his philosophy and his opposition to Enlightenment thought. Approaching his politics through the idea ofBildung, it argues that Herder first elaborated on this seminal concept in a series of early texts concerned with the reform of Russia. It analyses Herder's writings on Russia in the context of wider Enlightenment debates about the reform of the empire, and shows thatBildungwas employed as a means to mediate between contrasting models of political action put forward by contemporaries such as Voltaire and Denis Diderot. An outline of the subsequent development ofBildungin his anthropological works reinforces the political intention behind the concept, and situates Herder's political thought firmly within late eighteenth-century controversies.