Making Archives Explorable: Visualising Digital Materials for a Wider Public

The research project "A Fresh Look. Visualising Digitised German-Jewish Archives" aims to investigate human information-seeking strategies in archival contexts that go beyond targeted, systematic searching, namely open-ended, curiosity-driven browsing based on the available visual information. We describe our work with two contrasting archives. First the Jerusalem Guestbook of Moshe and Miryam Ben-Gavriêl, which contains 1,200 transcribed signatures, greetings, dedications, poems, and drawings in more than 20 languages, for which we have created a digital edition with three interlinked viewers. Second, the much larger written estate of Moritz Lazarus, consisting of more than 37,000 documents, including works and correspondence by and about Lazarus. This archive has been much less extensively catalogued, and we describe our approach to presenting the data in a manner which will encourage visitors to explore and engage with the archive, despite the challenge posed by the numerous images and sparse metadata.