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Collection Development

Statement of Purpose

September 2025

Grayzel is the new digital archive and web platform of Gratz College. Grayzel’s priority is to curate and present a diverse sampling of Jewish creativity pertaining to Modern Jewish History and Culture. Named for the spirit of historian and longtime Gratz professor, Solomon Grayzel, the online platform will provide open-source access to primary sources to democratize Jewish learning through the production of a state-of-the-art web platform and a modular database full of texts, images, videos, and sounds that capture the complexities of the Jewish experience in the modern world.

Grayzel is a digital archive; Gratz College does not store and preserve long-term physical assets. Temporary storage while processing and digitizing content is possible, but it is not a sustainable solution. The digital archive is an extension of the focus of Gratz College as a pioneer and innovator in digital education. 

Grayzel will focus on two areas of collection: content related to the Holocaust and post-Holocaust experience in the United States including experiences of survivors post-war; and Judaica Americana, in particular from and about the Philadelphia Jewish community, primarily from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Audience/Users

The Grayzel Digital Archive is a public-facing site, a project of Gratz College, but not intended to exclusively serve Gratz. As such, Grayzel will have several diverse user groups.

  • Educators (at all levels)
    Educators include high school and university instructors, curriculum developers, informal educators (e.g., supplemental religious schools and Jewish summer camps), and Jewish communal educators. This also includes clergy. All educators looking for sources and resources pertaining to modern Jewish history and culture.
  • Students
    Expected student populations are on the high school and university levels, as well as adult learners. In particular, Grayzel will serve the students at Gratz College, especially those in the Holocaust and Genocide Studies program. Instructors are encouraged to include Grayzel materials in their virtual classrooms, integrated through the Gratz course management system Canvas, as well as assist students to use the repository of materials contained in Grayzel for original research, towards Masters and Doctoral theses.
  • Researchers 
    Researchers include academics, journalists, anyone with experience in archival research, looking for texts and objects for their research and writing.
  • General Public
    The public is a broad category and includes anyone interested in learning about Judaism, modern Jewish history and culture, and the Holocaust. This may also include specific interest groups of survivors and descendants of survivors, Jewish communal leaders around Yom HaShoah, those interested in interfaith dialogue, and Jewish genealogists.

Unique user experiences will be designed for research, educational, and general public settings. These interfaces will allow for different curated experiences with more or less curator intervention, depending on audience needs.

Parameters

Grayzel will collect content primarily from the 19th and 20th centuries, related to the Holocaust and post-Holocaust experience in the United States including experiences of survivors post-war; and Judaica Americana, in particular from and about the Philadelphia Jewish community. These priorities are reflected in the holdings of current digital assets:

  • Elie Wiesel Digital Archive—250 linear feet, the archive contains Wiesel’s correspondence, manuscript material, images, videos, and audio recordings from nearly a half century of global leadership recognized by the Nobel Peace Prize.
  • Rebecca Gratz Correspondence—more than 800 transcribed and searchable letters, the correspondence of Rebecca Gratz with family and friends beginning in 1799 until her death in 1869.
  • Gratz Holocaust Oral History Archive—one of the earliest Holocaust oral history projects in the U.S. documenting a wide range of experiences during the Nazi era and Jewish life in pre-Nazi Europe. Holdings include interviews with over 900 survivors, rescuers, liberators, and other witnesses to the Holocaust. Special groupings include the testimonies of “Kindertransport” children sheltered in England, the 1985 Gathering of Holocaust Survivors, the 1991 and 1999 Rickshaw Reunions of Shanghai Survivors, and the Vilna Ghetto Fighters.
  • Lena Allen-Shore Papers—36 linear feet of letters and diaries primarily during the period of World War II, the Nazi Occupation of Poland, and post-war Poland and Quebec (from 1932 to 1967). The records document Allen-Shore’s life surviving the Nazi occupation as a Jewish woman hiding in plain sight as a Christian, her experiences in the Polish Resistance, and her life in Paris and Montreal after the war. As well as about 100 letter correspondence with Pope John Paul II dated from 1983–2004.
  • Eric Mandell German Music Collection—19th century German music collection, includes more than 15,000 items: books, articles, clippings, catalogues, anthologies, sheet music, vocal and instrumental compilations, and a variety of manuscripts. Digital assets will be hosted on the Grayzel platform, while the physical assets will be retained by the University of Pennsylvania.

The Grayzel platform will also look to reunite archives of significant Philadelphia Jews. The Rebecca Gratz Correspondence, for example, will employ the Grayzel platform to reunite disparate repositories of Rebecca Gratz’s letters into a cohesive collection, through library partnerships and interoperability. As such, we have acquired scans of more than 800 letters (with some metadata) from five library repositories.[1] We will continue to research the existence of additional letters from other physical and digital archives and hope to add those letters into our platform. 

Grayzel is an English language site but will include sources in many languages. It is expected that the most represented languages will be English, Hebrew, Yiddish, French, German, and Polish. We will attempt to translate content as much as possible but will not hold off digital publication until sources are translated. Instead, we will publish original language sources as available and update with translations when available. Educational resources and secondary sources will be in English.

We will accept text, image, audio, and video content. Book donations will be accepted on a case-by-case basis, depending on how well they fit the criteria for collections and whether they are rare, endangered, and merit digitization. 

A further area of collection (potentially beyond the scope of the above) will be Judaica digital archives that are looking for a hosting platform, because (a) they are a new collection, or (b) because an existing database is no longer in use, funded, and/or updated, and/or (c) a project is concerned about data sustainability and access. Grayzel will consider accepting these collections as digital files with metadata.

Grayzel will accept types of collections within scope with the following priority:

  1. Existing digitized collections with metadata looking for a platform for digital archival storage and display.
  2. Collections that have been processed and digitized but do not have metadata.
  3. Digitized collections of significance and that match our collecting content requirements.
  4. Processed physical collections of significance and that match our collecting content.
  5. On rare occasions, physical collections of significance, prestige, and/or endangerment that will further the greater goals of the Grayzel platform.

Endangered Archives:

A priority of Grayzel will be to support endangered archives. Endangerment may be physical—due to poor preservation and/or an unstable environment, where physical access is difficult—or digital endangerment due to loss of funding, interest, and/or digital upkeep. Grayzel’s solution for preservation and access is digitization.

Donation Policies

The Grayzel Digital Archive is unable to take all materials offered, accepting only those that are within the scope of its collection policies and targeted growth areas. Grayzel will accept donations that align with the collection priorities outlined above. 

Gift acceptance will be decided by the Director of Digital Scholarship, the President of the College, and the Director of Institutional Advancement.

Gifts in-kind may be accepted. Grayzel does not accept unsolicited gifts in-kind and reserves the right to dispose of unsolicited materials in any manner it deems appropriate. Grayzel staff may request to examine and assess collections in person, in advance of their transfer to Gratz College as part of the process of determining if a gift can be accepted, whether in whole or in part. Unsolicited monetary gifts may be accepted. Grayzel will only accept donations of materials to which the donor owns the rights and can be published online with open access. Exceptions to the open access policy will be made on a case-by-case basis, in particular, if it is questionable whether the content should be responsibly published on the internet, for example, collections of antisemetica.

Families with personal papers of a notable individual or Jewish communal organizations may give Gratz College access to the papers as an in-kind donation. If accepted, Gratz will either look to the owners of the papers or for outside funding to digitize the collection. Digital files will become the property of Gratz College. Once they are published online, digital copies will also be provided for the family. If the owners are not interested in maintaining their ownership of the papers, the Director of Digital Scholarship will work with them to help find an archive that is suitable to preserve and archive the collection. 

Terms of use and rights to the donated materials will be determined in a Deed of Gift, including the rights to use the materials for teaching and learning purposes. The Director of Digital Scholarship will work with the donor on permissions/restrictions regarding digitization and online publication.

Monetary gifts towards digitizing specific collections, supporting the Grayzel platform, as well as naming opportunities for the department of Digital Scholarship’s full time staff positions and for establishing fellowship programs for archivist interns, digital humanities/scholarship, and educators are very welcome. Maintaining digital storage and a digitally relevant repository and user experience are expensive and require almost constant upkeep so as not to become technologically obsolete. 

Selection and Deselection

Physical Retention:

Best efforts will be made to rehouse physical assets by archival standards in order to responsibly preserve and sustain collections. We will not retain physical objects, instead act as temporary stewards. We will also seek to “rehouse” assets if we are unable to responsibly store them. Any and all deaccessioning decisions will be informed by library and archival best practices.

Digital Retention:

We will perform regular review of files, ensuring that they are sustainable, checking for corruption, and ensuring that digital formats are up to current digital standards (i.e., linkrot). Storage includes both high resolution archival digital formats (tiff) and lower resolution formats for platform display (jpeg or png, pdfs). We will utilize IIIF technology (as capacity allows) to make images shareable.

Exclusions:

The Grayzel platform will not include collections/objects unrelated to the Holocaust or Philadelphia Jewish Community. As a leader in digital Judaica, we will offer advice to projects that do not fall within our collection policies on what they can do and will help to find a better fit if a collection is beyond the scope of our archive. Large collections of material objects will not be accepted, as this is beyond the capacity of the Grayzel team and Gratz College. We do not intend to set up 3D scanning, so everything would need to be outsourced/partnered.

Ethical Considerations

The Grayzel platform will strive to be ADA compliant, using best practices in web accessibility. The goal will to eventually include full cataloguing, metadata, English translation, descriptive text for all entries to facilitate access to content, and alt text for images. Grayzel will be intentional about its plans for digitization, establishing specific criteria for each collection before digitizing, in order to maximize institutional resources as well as honoring an awareness of the environmental impact of digitization and the existence of server farms.[2] Conversations with donors about partial or incomplete digitization will be part of gift discussions. 

Grayzel’s policy for open access publication will not override ethical considerations for making potentially harmful, antisemitic, and/or otherwise dangerous material available freely on the internet. We will take into consideration and make case-by-case decisions, weighing the values of accessibility with contributing to harmful and erroneous information on the internet. In such cases, objectionable material may be password protected and be made available by request only.

 

[1] Letters have been acquired from the American Jewish Historical Society, American Philosophical Society, The Rosenbach Museum & Library, Transylvania University, and University of North Carolina

[2]Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, “The Cloud Is Material: On the Environmental Impacts of Computation and Data Storage,” MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing, no. Winter 2022 (January 27, 2022), https://doi.org/10.21428/2c646de5.031d4553; Keith L. Pendergrass et al., “Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation,” accessed July 12, 2024, https://dx.doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-82.1.165.