History at a Click

Historic records conjure up images of dusty attics, yellowed papers and piles of unsorted boxes, lit by a single, swaying lightbulb.

At the Digital Curation Innovation Center (DCIC) in the College of Information Studies, researchers are working to create the cyberinfrastructure needed for 21st century archival work, and to support projects in the areas of justice, human rights and cultural heritage.

“In my life and career, the combination of education and archives has been very powerful,” says Associate Director Michael Kurtz, a retired National Archives administrator, who has taught at the university since 1990. Following a 2012 bequest of $500,000 to establish the Michael J. Kurtz Professorship in Archives and Digital Curation, he has made a new $500,000 bequest that will create an endowment fund to support the center’s efforts, including preserving data being produced today.

“We’re going to have to preserve this information that’s being created digitally, including social media,” he says. “We’re really exposing students to the tools and technologies they’re going to need for contemporary careers in archives.”

Kurtz spent nearly four decades at the National Archives, including leading the National Declassification Center to streamline efforts to make billions of pages of government records public. “If nobody knows about them and nobody gets to use them, historians can’t make judgments and opinions. If you’re concerned with government accountability, an accurate and complete historical record, you have to get them declassified.”

At the DCIC, his projects include creating a publicly accessible online database for historians and others to study the impact of emancipation on former slaves in Maryland and improving online access to Nazi-looted art to help Holocaust victims and their descendants identify and retrieve their property.

He, Research Software Architect Greg Jansen and a team of graduate students are reworking a portal created at the Archives in 2011 to link the collections of art stolen during World War II and now held at 18 institutions across the United States and Europe.

“Currently, artist names are rendered in different ways for different works of art,” he says. “There are language and translation problems. If you type in ‘violin,’ it won’t pick up anything in German because it’s not the same word.”

They hope to complete the new, user-friendly portal in spring 2017.