Digital Second Edition of Judaica Americana

The digital second edition of Judaica Americana makes searchable the 9,000 entries in the print edition. Taken as a whole, Singerman’s bibliography provides extensive and authoritative documentation of American Jewish communal activity and growth before 1901.

Visit project

The Digital Second Edition of Judaica Americana, an Omeka bibliographic database, draws from Robert Singerman’s Judaica Americana, a bibliography chronicling American Jewish book production until 1900. Visitors can search the database’s 9,600+ bibliographic entries for author, language, holding institution, and various tags, as well as find open-access links to digitized Jewish monographs, serials, and periodicals. Judaica Americana authoritatively chronicles American Jewish book production from the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century. The second edition contains an additional 3,000 entries. Taken as a whole, Singerman’s bibliography provides extensive documentation of American Jewish communal activity and growth before 1901.

I was responsible for the data preparation and project methodology. As the developer and designer, I designed the look and feel of the site, editing the Omeka theme that is used for the navigation and user interaction with the site.

Resources

• Esten, Emily. “Digital Second Edition of Judaica Americana: A Bibliography of Publications to 1900” Journal of Open Humanities Data 6, no. 4, (2020). DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/johd.15

• We have a repository on ScholarlyCommons, University of Pennsylvania’s open access institutional repository, dedicated to resources for the project:

  • Esten, Emily. “Dataset for Judaica Americana: A Bibliography of Publications to 1900”. Scribes of the Cairo Geniza, Scholarly Commons, 2019. Web.

  • Esten, Emily. “Dataset for Union List of Nineteenth-Century Jewish Serials Published in the United States”. Judaica Americana, Scholarly Commons, 2020. Web.

  • Singerman, Robert. “Judaica Americana: A Bibliography of Publications to 1900”. Judaica Americana, Scholarly Commons, 2019. Web.

• The Python scripts used in this project are maintained in a GitHub repository, including:

  • Esten, Emily. “Extract_singerman.py.” ja2-scripts, Github, accessed May 15, 2020, https://github.com/judaicadh/ja2-cleaning DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3894691

  • Enderle, Jonathan Scott. “tess.py.” ja2-scripts, Github, accessed May 15, 2020, https://github.com/judaicadh/ja2-cleaning. (Forked from its original repository) DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3894691

  • Esten, Emily. “flip-index-headers.py.” ja2-scripts, Github, accessed May 15, 2020,https://github.com/judaicadh/ja2-cleaning DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3894691

  • Esten, Emily. “extract-singerman-serials.py.” ja2-scripts, Github, accessed May 15, 2020, https://github.com/judaicadh/ja2-cleaning DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3894691