Lessons learned: Collaborating to digitise Yiddish-language collections at Cornell

This paper describes a grant-funded collaboration between Cornell University Library, the Kheel Center for Labor-Management Documentation & Archives, Digital Consulting and Production Services, and faculty members from Cornell’s Jewish Studies Program to select, digitise, describe and disseminate English and Yiddish-language records created between 1930 and 1953 by the Jewish People’s Fraternal Order division of the International Workers Order. To serve researchers in the Yiddish-language community as well as English readers, Yiddish-language documents were partially translated and transliterated to reduce the language barrier and facilitate discovery and analysis. The project required a wide variety of specialists to communicate effectively and negotiate goals, workflows and standards. As this paper discusses, responsibilities such as file and document management, metadata creation and review, and quality control are especially demanding when working with documents composed of a language and alphabet that most of the project participants do not understand. Challenges and opportunities encouraged collaborators to re-evaluate and redesign certain existing workflows, and reaffirmed the benefit of others. The online dissemination of the records has opened access to a global audience, promoting scholarly work based on the digitised records along with greater interest in related analogue collections.