New European Project: J-Ark, the European Jewish Community Archive

Pangeanic has been awarded a new European project dealing with the preservation of cultural assets. After winning Europeana Translate to help integrate machine translation of European cultural assets, Pangeanic doubles up by creating an infrastructure: J-Ark, the European Jewish Community Archive to connect the eArchiving, Europeana, and eTranslation CEF digital services to support long-term viability and sustainability of Jewish heritage archives in an integrated long-term preservation platform named J-Ark. This online solution will offer cloud services to ingest, preserve and distribute a wide range of heritage materials, including oral history interviews and recordings, historical photographs, documents, and more. J-Ark will be based on RODA, a mature open-source digital preservation platform, and will be customised according to the project needs. J-Ark will provide built-in support for Europeana and eTranslation DSIs. As a result, the ingested heritage materials will be offered to Europeana for publishing and automatically translated into the European languages of choice. The long-term sustainability of the system will be ensured through a combination of public funding, private funding (including from Jewish philanthropy) and usage fees. This project is an eArchiving Generic Services project, and it is co-financed by the Connecting Europe Facility of the European Union.

Project partners

Pangeanic - Spain (coordinator)
Stichting Jewish Heritage Network - Netherlands
Keep Solutions - Portugal
Europeana Foundation - Netherlands
Ośrodek “Brama Grodzka - Poland
Jewish Community of Lithuania - Lithuania