J-Ark - European Jewish Community Archive connected software components from three different initiatives funded by the European Commission (eArchiving, Europeana, eTranslation). It supported the long-term viability and sustainability of Jewish heritage archives in an integrated long-term preservation platform named J-Ark.
This online solution offers cloud services to ingest, preserve and distribute a wide range of heritage materials, including oral history interviews and recordings, historical photographs, documents and more. J-Ark is based on RODA, a mature open-source digital preservation platform.
During the project, a total of 12,389 Jewish Heritage records were ingested into Europeana.eu. The Jewish heritage content was provided by two pilot partners TNN from Poland and LZB from Lithuania.
The aggregation of the collections to Europeana.eu was made possible through the participation of these two partner organisations in hackathons and training sessions which developed and implemented migration plans.
Important features of J-Ark include a Data Anonymisation Service and a Machine Translation Service developed by project partner Pangeanic. The anonymisation feature uses AI to detect personally identifiable information within cultural heritage content and employs various anonymisation methods to replace sensitive data. The translation feature is specifically designed for cultural heritage content and reuses data from previous CEF telecom funded projects Europeana XX and Europeana Translate. This supports automatic translation specifically adapted to the nuances of heritage content enabling accurate and contextually appropriate translations.
The long-term sustainability of the system will be ensured through a combination of public funding, private funding (including from Jewish philanthropy) and usage fees.
This project was an eArchiving Generic Services project co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union.
