An interview with Liesbeth Heenk, founder of Amsterdam Publishers (2012), who is a major publisher of Holocaust memoirs written by second- and third-generation survivors.
This essay is an abridged, translated version of Zvi Barsky's 2019 Hebrew book, Making a Mark: Booksellers in Palestine, 1870–1948. The study is based on the author's collection of rare booksellers’ labels, his thorough scan of period newspapers, and interviews with dozens of people.
In January 2022, the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research completed the Edward Blank YIVO Vilna Online Collections Project, a major international initiative to virtually reunite YIVO’s prewar collection held by YIVO in New York and three Lithuanian institutions: the Lithuanian Central State Archives, the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania, and the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. This project, which took seven years to complete and had a budget of nearly 7 million dollars, was the largest and most comprehensive digitization initiative YIVO had ever embarked on. This article chronicles the initiation, planning, and implementation of this major undertaking. It focuses on the success, setbacks, and lessons learned by the project team and how the procedures and workflows develop throughout the project now form the framework of YIVO’s subsequent digitization efforts.
