Celebrating Tel Aviv: A digitized collection

Several years ago, I interviewed Eliasaf Robinson at his warren-like bookshop (interior photo above) on Tel Aviv's Nahalat Benyamin and marveled at the holdings stacked to the ceiling, covering every available vertical and horizontal space.

Robinson's is a major destination for those looking for Yizkor books and other genealogically relevant materials. There are several stores, warehouses and special collections are housed elsewhere.

He is the fourth generation of a family of booksellers and most prominent antiquarian book dealer in Israel. He began this Tel Aviv collection as a teenager, in the 1960s.

During the interview for the Jerusalem Post story, I learned much about collections - that the best are kept in Jerusalem (even if owners live elsewhere) because of the lower humidity that prevents growth of mold and other damage to photographs and paper. During my visit, the phone rang off the hook as people called to ask if he had this or that item, and people came through the door with items they thought he might be interested in acquiring.

In 2005, Stanford University acquired Eliasaf Robinson's collection of books, pamphlets, magazines, printed ephemera, posters, postcards, photographs, maps, architectural plans, and original documents about the early history of "The First Hebrew City" Tel Aviv.

Over some 40 years, he amassed some 500 books and periodicals and 20 linear feet of archival materials. According to the website, it is among the most sought-after resources in the Stanford University Libraries.

Robinson was impressed by the university's ability to digitize its holdings and make them accessible over the Web. Over the past 18 months, about 50% has been scanned, according to the website. This includes more than 1,000 photographs and postcards, 300 printed volumes, 200 large format materials (posters, maps and sewer diagrams) and six linear feet of archival materials.

There are so many different formats in the collection that the process was challenging, ranging from posters to fragile single sheets and tightly-bound books. Many types of scanning devices were necessary and these are detailed at the link above. In the first digitization, the library's Judaica and Hebraica curator Zachary Baker focused on pre-1948 material.

Learn more about accessing the online images here. Browse online through the archival boxes and folders of the collection online at the site above. Click on a thumbnail image to see the full-size image. Search for hotographs and books by title, subject or description. Read books online and view images in close-up detail.

See the very detailed extensive finding aid page here. It indicates that genealogists will have a field day with this collection.

Items include business cards, real estate records, blueprints, advertisements, business correspondence, construction and housing, movie posters, cinema, culture, opera and orchestra, sports, holidays, museums, sheet music, maps, associations, committees, charities, education, legal documents, medical documents, political activity. Under photographs, categories include albums, loose pages, mounted prints, glass slides; buildings, commercial, people, events, postcards and school documents. The Tel Aviv municipality category includes documents, ephemera, civil guard, military, letters, licensing, street census and much more, as well as clippings.

Have fun! The image (above left) is part of a pre-1948 postcard view of Tel Aviv's beach, called HaYarkon. It looks much the same today! Robinson's website is only in Hebrew, but the photos are great!

UCLA: Western Jewish collection to go online in May

UCLA recently acquired a collection of Jewish history of the American West, compiled by the late Dr. Norton Stern and Rabbi William Kramer. David W. Epstein and Gladys Sturman catalogued, indexed and archived it.

Now digitized, it is expected to go online in May.

Kramer and Stern defined the American West as all the land west of the Mississippi River, Hawaii and parts of Mexico. Jews played a large role in the West's development because they were literate, knew about business and were trusted by gold prospectors and native Americans.

The collection was in some 400 boxes of photos, documents, scrapbooks, clippings, memoirs and other memorabilia. Stern, an optomotrist, searched small Western towns looking for relevant items, and amassed most of the collection.

Assisting the project were members of Congregation Shir Ami (Woodland Hills) with funding from the Jewish Community Foundation ($18,000 grant) and from Sturman herself ($10,000).

The collection has been digitized by history doctoral candidate Caroline Luce.

Also benefiting from Stern and Kramer's work are the American Jewish University (1,000 books), Autry National Center (2,000 photos) with ephemera to the Huntington Research Library - partnering with USC.

This new online resource should be valuable for those searching Western Jewish history.

Newberry Library: Digitized Jewish resources online

A selection of books from the Newberry's collection are now available digitally through the Internet Archive, according to the Newberry blog. Most are histories of religious congregations or specialized professional directories in Chicago.

The books are full-text searchable in a variety of formats.

Jewish resources include:

History of Kehillath Anshe Maarabh: Congregation of the Men of the West (1897)

The 50-year history of the oldest congregation in the city provides much information on the early Jewish community.


The Chicago Jewish Community Blue Book for 1918 is a veritable treasurehouse of names, photographs, history and commercial advertisements offering a good flavor of the times - it was published in 1918. Institutions and organizations are detailed, and there is an extensive listing of Chicago's Jewish residents, including addresses.

There are other non-Jewish resources listed, as well as early 20th century medical, law and real estate directories. Visit the link above for more information.

Google: Digitizing historical newspapers

Reuters reported on Google's digitization of old newspapers here.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Google Inc has stepped up efforts to digitize dozens of historical newspapers and make scanned images of the original papers available online, the Internet search leader said on Monday.

In a blog post on the Silicon Valley-based company's website, Google said it is looking to make old newspapers searchable online by partnering with newspaper publishers to digitize millions of pages of news archives.

The effort involves the archives of dozens of newspaper titles and expands on a two-year-old effort by Google to work with two major U.S. newspapers -- The New York Times and Washington Post -- to index old papers in Google News Archive.

"Not only will you be able to search these newspapers, you'll also be able to browse through them exactly as they were printed -- photographs, headlines, articles, advertisements and all," Google product manager Punit Soni said in the blog post.

The new papers range from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, "the first newspaper West of the Alleghenies" (the Allegheny Mountains), to the Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph, which has continuously published for 244 years, making it North America's oldest lasting paper.

Initial project partners - ProQuest and Heritage - are in the US and Canada. Click the link above for the complete story.

The original Google blog link is here, and stated:

This effort is just the beginning. As we work with more and more publishers, we'll move closer towards our goal of making those billions of pages of newsprint from around the world searchable, discoverable, and accessible online.

For more on the Google/Proquest partnership, check out Randy Seaver's posting here and Dick Eastman's posting here. For the New York Times article, click here.

I'm looking forward to the day when enterprising sites will scan, digitize and place online collections of Ladino and Judeo-Farsi newspapers.