Instructions for Accessing Records Relating to Membership in the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) (A3340) on the AWS Registry of Open Data

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Open Data Sponsorship, posted two portions (MFKL and MFOK) of Records Relating to Membership in the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Labor Party (NSDAP)), 1927-1945 (A3340) (National Archives Identifier 12044361) to the AWS Registry of Open Data. This documentation guides users in how to access the data.

About the Dataset

The NSDAP dataset on the AWS Registry of Open Data includes over 14 million digital objects and metadata, including Textract-generated OCR text. The files are arranged into directories by microfilm roll, with each directory containing a TIF file for each image on the roll, a PDF that combines all of the images on the roll, and a JSON file with the metadata about the roll and extracted text from each image. The OCR was generated by the National Archives Catalog using Amazon Textract.

The screenshots on the right show portions of an example JSON file. The fields reflect the structure of the Catalog records that contain these images; i.e. "title" is the title of the file unit, "naId" is the National Archives Identifier, "containerId" is the microfilm roll number. The OCR is stored in the "extractedText" field for each digital object, and the "objectFilename" maps the OCR information to the specific image within the directory.

Access Methods

The AWS Registry of Open Data is a service provided by AWS to store open, public datasets for free so that they can be accessed and analyzed on AWS. Users can access both the full dataset and specific portions of the dataset using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) , an open source tool that enables users to interact with AWS services using commands in their command-line. Documentation for AWS CLI is available here.

Accessing the Full Dataset

The full dataset can be accessed with the following Amazon Resource Name (ARN): arn:aws:s3:::nara-nsdap To list the full dataset using AWS CLI, use the following command: aws s3 ls s3://nara-nsdap/ --no-sign-request To pull the full dataset using AWS CLI, use the following command: aws s3 sync s3://nara-nsdap/ [destination] --no-sign-request

Accessing Portions of the Dataset

To pull portions of the dataset, i.e. only specific rolls of microfilm or alphabetical spans, find the data you want in the table and use our AWS CLI command builder.