Historical Context and the Information Age: the Diaspora of Holocaust Archives

Imagine the archive of the year 2151. It will be fundamentally different from the one we use today: there is no smell of old paper, no reading room, no grey-haired archivist, just servers linked to the cordless universe-wide-web. The information will be available to the users on their latest bio-digital computers which are integrated in their eyelids and linked to their brains. Let us suppose that a student of history, who lives in a peaceful colony on Mars, is interested in earth-history and wants to understand how the Holocaust could happen. When this question flashes through his mind, the computer immediately transmits a query to Boogle, the universal knowledge system. Of course Boogle almost instantaneously comes up with a number of suggestions: lots of movies like “Schindler’s List”, views of digitised books from the twentieth-century and a virtual tour of the “Anne Frank Museum” in Amsterdam, an exotic place. But our student wants to get to the core of things and selects something called ‘Holocaust digitised paper archives 1933-1945’. To him the idea of paper as a carrier of information is hard to grasp. His mind is adapted to receiving and interpreting information that is presented to him by Boogle via his eyelids, but not to reading information on paper. Reading is something from the dark ages of human evolution. Being quite bright, although his IQ of 220 is only just above the average, our student understands that if he really wants to understand what happened more than 200 years ago on earth, he will need to analyse the way people and organisations communicated in those days. It takes him a couple of hours to find information about the paper bureaucracy, typewriters, secretaries, index card-files, pencils, Typex, telephone lines and telex-machines. Viewing “Schindler’s List”, once he has overcome the problem that it’s not in 3D, gives him an idea of how all this worked. Then, at last, he turns his mind again to the ‘digital paper archives’. He works through all the lists, the cards and other documents. And it is quite mindboggling to him. Our poor student gets frustrated for the first time in his academic life. Yes, all these documents are available with all sorts of data, but there is no logic. Some documents seem to be copied many times. On many documents he perceives handwritten notes that he can hardly decipher. The meaning of stamps and abbreviations is unknown. For a second he even thinks that it all must have been a big hoax, but then in a bright flash he sees the problem. The files presented in the