The Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project (JDCRP), an organization founded in Berlin in 2016, announced today that it has added AI capabilities to its provenance research tool, Legacy Explorer, which launched last year.
Legacy Explorer is currently able to search five archives, including the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg archive at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, as well as several others that organize property cards and photographs. A sixth archive will be added later this month, according to a statement from the JDCRP.
Prior to this AI sync, users would have to search each archive individually. Now, the AI document-scanning tools, along with partnerships with organizations and archives around the world, will allow researchers to pull information about the same cultural object from different sources at the same time. There are still dozens of other databases and archives for looted artwork and artifacts that contain information about Nazi-looted art and heirlooms.
“The platform addresses an urgent gap in provenance research: the lack of a single place where experts and the general public can easily search across archival collections and access the historical documentation of an object’s provenance,” JDCRP board chair Wesley A. Fisher said in a statement about Legacy Explorer. (Fisher is also director of research for the Claims Conference, the nonprofit that co-founded, with the Commission on Art Recovery, JDCRP in 2019.)
Last month, a group of business school professors at Santa Clara University launched a new AI tool aimed at helping heirs research and identify Nazi-era looted artwork by scraping the Jeu de Paume–managed database managed.
“For descendants of survivors, Legacy Explorer’s expansion will provide a path to trace the journey of cultural property stolen from their families,” said Deirdre Berger, the chair of JDCRP’s executive board.
