EHRI 2.0: A Look Beyond the Current Project

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Thursday, 6 November, 2014

The EHRI project is currently in its final phase, and all hands are on deck to get our work finished in time for the Presentation of the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure on 26 March 2015 in Berlin.

Lasting impact

Successfully finishing our current work is of course vitally important. Nevertheless, we have recently also put much effort into ensuring that EHRI has a future well beyond March 2015. Many of the activities that EHRI has started - for instance, identifying and integrating Holocaust-related collections; maintaining and expanding the EHRI portal; discussing and developing innovative methods for Holocaust research; or providing training and fellowship opportunities to young Holocaust researchers - must be undertaken over a prolonged period of time, if they are to have a lasting impact on the Holocaust research landscape. 

Horizon 2020

Within EHRI we have discussed various options of how we can ensure the continuation of these and similar activities in the medium to long-term. To secure further funding from the European Commission (EC) is one important such option, and we succeeded in receiving a call for continuation funding for EHRI in the EC's current Horizon 2020 programme. The deadline for the submission of proposal under this call was at the beginning of September, and we submitted a proposal that, if successful, would secure EHRI’s future to 2019!

Continuation and deepening

Part of the work we propose to undertake if our application should prove successful is a continuation and deepening of our current activities. But EHRI 2.0 would offer much more than just more of the same. To give a few examples: Our proposal includes new consortium partners that would complement our existing expertise and give EHRI an even wider reach across Europe and beyond. EHRI 2.0 would also see an intensification of our current efforts to map Holocaust sources in Eastern and Southern Europe, and to strengthen research capacities in these regions through collaboration. Finally, rather than exclusively focusing on archival metadata, we plan to work with digital copies of Holocaust archives in the second phase of the project, and to develop new digital tools and methods that can help in the analysis of such data.

EHRI 2.0

The plan we set out to the EC for EHRI 2.0 is ambitious and exciting. We expect to hear early next year whether our proposal has been successful, and we will of course keep you informed about all developments.

Reto Speck, NIOD and KCL

Photo: the current EHRI team for a General Partner Meeting in Jerusalem, January 2012. ©Yad Vashem