What has changed

The index is revised as corrections arrive and new layers are added; this page lists the changes a reader would notice, newest first. The date at the foot of every page is the date of the build you are reading.

30 October 2026 — the site goes public

Every town now carries its name in the language of its country (Ukrainian, Romanian, Hungarian, Slovak) beside the Yiddish name, and its page lists the other names a reader may know it by — Russian, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, German, Hebrew, former names — so that the search finds a town under any of them. The site was given its look: the type of the region's Russian and Yiddish books, and an ornament drawn after the Jewish folk art of these towns (see About).

30 October 2026 — conversations, birth places, open questions

Below the tape a second layer was added: the conversations — one speaker, one place, however many tapes carry it — so that a person's page lists each interview as a unit that can be played from beginning to end, across tapes, and a town's page lists the interviews made there rather than the tapes that happen to pass through it. A second map shows where the speakers were born. Whatever the project inferred rather than found in the catalogue carries a small mark that opens an e-mail for a correction; the open questions page gathers all of it. The videos now play from archive.org first, with YouTube as the alternative; the map no longer distinguishes the recordings of 2002–2012 from the later ones.

25 October 2026 — the transcript layer and the later expeditions

Passages that the catalogue does not describe gained descriptions from the project's machine transcript, marked as such; the recordings of the expeditions of 2012–2018, which have no video online, were added as text.

24 October 2026 — first build

The index as built from the catalogue of Indiana University's Media Collections Online: places, people, recordings, topics, songs and the questionnaire, every passage playable, with full-text search.