Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project (JDCRP): Introduction to JDCRP`s central digital archival platform on Nazi-looted art
Abstract
The Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project Foundation (JDCRP) is in the final stages of developing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for its central digital archival platform on Nazi-looted art. The MVP will be launched with an initial focus on the so-called property cards produced by a special unit of the Allied Forces directly after the war documenting their recovery of over a million looted objects in Germany and in occupied countries. The MVP includes property cards andphotographs linked to the Wiesbaden and Marburg CCPs. JDCRP would like to present its work converting and uploading Allied Forces property cards and photographs on its digital platform as a 20-minute presentation. The property cards from the CCPs bear highly complex structured information, which JDCRP was able to transform into equally structured metadata with an extremely low error rate. The presentation will explain the AI-generated transcriptions of documents produced with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, supported by manual review processes, to guarantee accurate and verifiable metadata. The presentation will address topics including data modelling and management, ontologies, standardized data, structured data, geomappings, text and image recognition, and natural language processing. It will end with a brief overview of JDCRP`s engagement in research on persecuted Jewish artists and collectors, as well as educational projects it sponsors to raise public awareness of the dimensions, relevance, and lasting significance of Nazi-era cultural plunder for Jewish and European cultural heritage. This presentation was given as part of the conference ‘Digital Turn. Collections – Provenances – Markets’, which took place on 27 and 28 November 2025 at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.