News
An Award for the Museum
The Sybilla 2001 statuettes—for the best museum events of the year—were awarded on Saturday at the Royal Palace in Warsaw. For several years now, the awards have been made on May 18, International Museum Day.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum received second prize in the Historical, Biographical, and Literary Exhibition category for "the arrangement of the interior of the camp central bathhouse building [to illustrate] the history and functioning of the building, and for Before They Departed… Photographs Found in Auschwitz."
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim Digital Archive Project was awarded Honorable Mention in the Organizational Achievements category. Polish Minister of Culture Andrzej Celiński presented the awards.
Work on the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Digital Archive Project began more than ten years ago. It provides access to the approximately 500,000 personal records of prisoners and camp victims, with hundreds of items of information on each of them, and offers the possibility of directly viewing tens of thousands of scanned images.
At present, the use of the most up-to-date information technology makes the information and memories collected in this digital archive available to individuals and researchers. In addition to this, the integrated computer system already provides access to data bases created with the use of various documents collected over the decades. It also makes it possible for the information from the data bases to be compiled in any given way. For instance, data on a prisoner can be supplemented by his or her photograph and information about the barracks where he or she was imprisoned.
Detailed searches have been made for scores of visitors to the Museum. In most cases, these are private individuals, former prisoners, or members of their families. This information technology makes it possible to issue the needed affidavits to the thousands of former prisoners who have in recent years been pursuing their claims for compensation for being imprisoned in the camp. Those who were born after the war can find the names of the relatives they never knew in the Memory Books that have been published.
