Collections at the Yiddish Book Center
Thursday, September 12 2:00pm - 3:00pm eastern (Zoom)
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The Yiddish Book Center, in Amherst, Massachusetts is home to approximately one million volumes of Yiddish books in print, as well as collections of sheet music, archival recordings, and oral histories. Approximately 11,000 of these Yiddish books are available online and full-text searchable in the Yiddish Book Center's Spielberg Digital Library and will soon be available in the Universal Yiddish Library, a digital library of Yiddish books from multiple institutions, including the National Library of Israel, the New York Public Library, and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. Some recent, grant-funded, projects include cataloging all The Wexler Oral History Project's 1000+ recordings so that they are available in WorldCat, enriching the search experience on our website with additional metadata and functionality, and training our OCR program (Jochre) to read a "golden corpus" of challenging Yiddish texts in an effort to enhance full-text search. This presentation will explore how libraries and librarians can utilize the Yiddish Book Center's collections for various educational purposes.
Michelle Sigiel is the metadata librarian at the Yiddish Book Center where she catalogs books and other Yiddish resources and oversees metadata for digital collections. One of her current projects at the Yiddish Book Center includes cataloging the Wexler Oral History Project's 1000+ recordings as part of the Humanities Collections and Reference Resources grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities' Division of Preservation and Access. She received her MLIS with a concentration in Archival Management from Simmons College in 2017, an MA in History from the University of Vermont in 2013, and a BA with three simultaneous degrees in History, Political Science, and Holocaust & Genocide Studies from Keene State College in 2010. She has held various positions in several academic libraries and special collections where her work has focused on metadata, archival description and arrangement, and preservation.
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Sally Stieglitz
Communications and Outreach Coordinator
Long Island Library Resources Council
She/Her/Hers
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