Holdings
The Library has current holdings of more than 85,000 items. It is a multi-language collection with most items in English, German, Polish, Hebrew, or Yiddish.
The Library also has many active journal subscriptions, with periodical holdings in the fields of American and European history, genocide studies, and Jewish studies, and historical newspapers and newsletters on microfilm.
Scope of the Collection
The Library serves as a repository for Holocaust-related publications. As such, it attempts to collect comprehensively in the following areas:
- Historiography and documentation of the Holocaust and the Third Reich
- Holocaust-related art, music, and literature
- Personal accounts of survivors and victims
- War crimes and war crimes trials
- Revisionist and denial literature
In order to support background research on the Holocaust and related topics, and to support the larger work of the Museum and Library, the Library collects at a general level materials in the following areas:
- World War II
- Comparative genocide studies
- Jewish genealogical and cultural history as affected by the Holocaust
- Antisemitism and racism
- Museum studies, archival studies, and library and information science
- General reference
History and Mission
The Library's formal mission is:
To provide access to published knowledge on the Holocaust and genocide studies in varying media and to foster study on these subjects in an historical context consistent with the exhibition, preservation, research, and educational responsibilities of the Museum.
The Library accomplishes this mission by acquiring and organizing important materials relating to Holocaust and genocide studies and by helping our users effectively access these materials, whether in print or electronic form. Our user population includes Museum staff, scholars, researchers, all branches of the Federal government, and the general public.
The Library opened in December 1993, but its development began years before. As the director of the Library at that time, Elizabeth Koenig, herself a Holocaust survivor, oversaw the difficult steps of creating a library from the ground up. A small collection of books, initially acquired for the research necessary to create the Museum's Permanent Exhibition, came to form the core of the collection, and in those early years, growth came primarily through donations of books from myriad sources.
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