The collection, hosted on Yad Vashem's website, contains some 130,000 high-resolution black-and-white and sepia-toned photos as well as documents related to Holocaust victims. Texts for many of the documents were transcribed by experimental optical character recognition (OCR) and posted underneath.
You can search for names in the archive. For instance, a search for Jewish refugee Rena Weiser pulls up a link to a visa issued to her by the Consulate of Chile in France. Furthermore you can add personal stories below images in the archive.
The Yad Vashem partnership is part of our larger effort to bring important cultural and historical collections online, Google wrote in the blog post. In the past Google has digitized archives from the National Library of the Netherlands, collections at the Prado Museum in Madrid, and the LIFE photo archive.
The initiative was timed for the UN International Holocaust Remembrance Day tomorrow, Janurary 27. The day commemorates the anniversary of the Soviet liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in 1945.