Important information
This blog includes mention of the Holocaust and highlights a record that discusses violence against Jewish people.
The National Archives is proud to be one of four partners leading the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure UK (EHRI-UK), a national body representing Holocaust-related collections in the UK which launched last year.
The other founding members are the Wiener Holocaust Library, the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London and the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton. Together, we aim to support Holocaust research, commemoration and education across the UK and beyond.
The European Holocaust Research Infrastructure
The wider European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI) has been supporting Holocaust research on a transnational level since 2010, with funding from the European Commission. In 2025 it became a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC), a permanent legal organisation with government support from each participating nation.
Launched in 2015, the EHRI portal, was planned as a centralised platform where researchers could access descriptions of Holocaust collections held in institutions around the world. Records relating to the Holocaust are often spread out globally across institutions which can make research difficult. Therefore, pulling record descriptions into one central portal will allow wider access to these records, supporting the research process.
This is similar to Discovery, which is our platform where you can search record descriptions of collections held in institutions across the UK.
To date, the EHRI portal offers access to more than 380,000 record descriptions held in over 2,300 archives across 60 countries.
Support from the UK
The EHRI-UK was founded to support this work. To achieve this, each partner focuses on a different aspect of EHRI-UK’s portfolio. The National Archives' role focuses on the technical aspect of taking in collections metadata from UK archives and sharing them to the EHRI portal.
Currently, the EHRI portal features collection descriptions from six UK institutions. Our project aims to increase the representation of UK-held Holocaust collections within this portal.
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Telegram
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Copied LCS 168 8.30 Leicester Square 310
Prime Minister Winston Churchill Downing Street Ldn
I feel that it is my duty to pass on to you this SOS call sent out from the secret headquarters of the Jewish Underground Labour Movement somewhere in Poland “lives must be saved before it is too late”. The Jews of Poland go down fighting. Heroic armed resistance of the ghettoes of Warsaw Bialystok general strike of 150000 Jewish worked behind ghetto walls of Lodz armed revolts in horrible gas-chamber infernos of determination of Jewish underground labour movement to fight the Nazis until the last.
Telegram to Prime Minster Winston Churchill regarding SOS call from the Jewish Underground Labour Movement, 19 March 1944. Catalogue reference: FO371-42790
How we plan to achieve this
The work has two sides; firstly, we establish technical workflows to ensure a smooth data transfer process. This also helps us gain a more detailed understanding of which UK archives hold relevant collections. In the next phase, we will be asking UK archives who may hold relevant collections relating to the Holocaust to get in touch with the project.
This will help us map:
- where collections are held
- how many collections there are
- how they are currently catalogued
From this work, we will have a better understanding of how we can transfer data into the EHRI portal.
Technical details
In the UK, archive collections are catalogued to standards published and maintained by the International Council on Archives (ICA). This standardised approach allows us to efficiently exchange data between systems.
Here, when we refer to 'collections data', we mean information about what the collection is made up of. This gives researchers enough information to judge whether the collection is useful for their research.
ISAD(G), the ICA cataloguing standard, offers 26 data elements that can be used to describe the contents of a collection, its extent and physical characteristics. Archives can then use an XML standard called Encoded Archival Description (EAD) to encode the data and publish it online.
To achieve this, a data analyst will design workflows to take collections data from different sources and transform it into a standardised EAD format so it can enter the portal. From here, we will share our work with others working on data integration across Europe in a trans-national working group.
What we've achieved so far
Our first pilot for this work is to test and refine the data workflows that will be integrated into collections relating to the Holocaust from The National Archives. Relevant collections are held across several different departments, from the War Office, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and Foreign Office, to name just a few. We also have detailed research guides (Nazi persecution and the Holocaust and War Crimes 1939-1945 ) which are aiding in the research by identifying relevant collections for inclusion.
Our next steps are to begin piloting this workflow. By March 2026, we aim to have begun increasing UK representation in the EHRI portal, paving the way for a significant increase of UK Holocaust-related collections over the coming years.
