Language and Culture Archive of Ashkenazic Jewry Digital Archive User Guide: Introduction

This is a supplementary guide to the Digitized data for the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry, which makes available online the linguistic and ethnographic information about YIddish, gathered by the LCAAJ team so that researchers could map or otherwise systematically analyze it. 

For information on how to search the Digitized LCAAJ, see Searching for Answers to Questions.

Before beginning your search, we strongly suggest that you look at the page providing an overview of the collection, and look at the important scope note below. A finding aid for the physical archive is online, and includes links to audio re-digitized as part of the Mellon-funded initiative for time-based media (ongoing).

What the digitized LCAAJ website does:

• Provides access to the images of the pages with answers given in interviews in the form of Blue Books, Answer Sheets, and Printouts
  • Further information about these materials can be found in this guide under Answer Data
• Provides filters to allow one to limit their search by format or location/region
• Provides detailed metadata for those answers to allow ease of searching
• Provides persistent URLs and IIIF manifests to allow use of the images in other contexts

What the digitized LCAAJ website DOES NOT do:

• Provide an interface for digitally mapping data (for that, we recommend taking a look at the LCAAJResearch page, as well as joining our community of LCAAJ scholars by sending us an email at lcaaj@library.columbia.edu)
• Provide text-searchable answers to the questions (for that, see LCAAJResearch for access to downloadable PDFs of the printouts with OCR, and to read more about our plans on gathering that information as a community).