About the Project
Whose Project is it?
The Poor Jews' Temporary Shelter Database is a project of Professor Aubrey Newman and
Dr. Graham Smith, both of the Department of History in University of Leicester, in the
United Kingdom. Because many of the people that passed through the Shelter between the
years of 1895 and 1914 came to South Africa, the project is of considerable potential
interest to the South African Jewish community, and has been financially supported by the Kaplan Centre at the University of Cape Town.
Purpose of the Project
Apart from its value as a research resource, the database is used systematically at the
University of Leicester as a learning resource for undergraduate students in the History
Department. Most of the data has been captured by students as part of their official
assignments. Students also carry out projects in which they analyze the data in various
ways.
Reponsibility for the Web version
The Kaplan Centre at the University of Cape Town is responsible for the creation and
maintenance of this presentation of the Poor Jews' Temporary Shelter Database on the World
Wide Web, as a service to South Africans who may be interested in its contents.
The master data resides in an Ingres database at the University of Leicester, and all
additions and changes to the data are made there under the control of Dr Graham Smith.
Access via the web is to a copy of the data which resides in an MS Access database on a
server at the University of Cape Town. The Kaplan Centre makes no alterations whatsoever
to the data itself.
Acknowledgements
The idea of making the Poor Jews' Temporary Shelter Database accessible to South
Africans has been championed personally by Mr. Mendel Kaplan, and also by the Director of
the Kaplan Centre, Professor Milton Shain.
The willing co-operation of the creators of the Database, Professor Aubrey Newman and
Dr. Graham Smith, is gratefully acknowledged.
Dr. Duncan Martin, former Director of Information Technology at the University of Cape Town, conceived the web-based service and was instrumental in arranging for a copy of the data to be made available for this purpose.
Mr. Franz Dullaart, formerly of the Information Technology Services at the University of Cape Town, set up the MS Access database and created the scripts which permit it to be queried from these web pages.
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