USC Shoah Foundation – Institute for Visual History and Education

In 1994, after the filming of Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg founded the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation with the aim of videotaping 50,000 first-person accounts by Holocaust survivors and witnesses. The massive global documentation effort began with the first interview on April 18, 1994. The foundation trained 2,300 interviewer candidates in 24 countries, hired 1,000 videographers, and recruited more than 100 regional coordinators and staff in 34 countries to organize the interviewing process in their respective regions. Between 1994 and 2000, interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses took place in 56 countries and were conducted in 32 languages. The interviewing methodology was developed in consultation with Holocaust historians, psychologists, and experts in the field of oral history. The life history format of the interview meant interviewees discussed their lives before, during, and after the Holocaust. The organization’s trainings, interviewer guidelines, and videographer guidelines ensured that the interviews would be conducted with a consistent approach. In the foundation’s offices on the backlot of Universal Studios, staff pioneered innovations to address the challenges of how to ingest, preserve, and catalog the massive number of hours of video being recorded on Betacam SP tapes. The organization holds 11 patents on the digital collection management technologies it developed. The Visual History Archive now contains more than 115,000 hours of testimony – the equivalent of a dozen years. Due to the patented indexing and search engine, users can pinpoint moments of interest down to the minute. In January of 1999, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation recorded its 50,000th testimony. As collection of new testimonies slowed down compared to the massive collection efforts before, work on cataloging the collection intensified, and the organization focused even more deeply on developing global partnerships to achieve its goals of preserving and providing access to the archive, building and supporting educational programs, and developing educational products based on the testimonies. In January of 2006, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation became a part of the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California. It was renamed the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education. When the organization joined USC, there were nearly 52,000 testimonies in its archive. Further technological innovations ensured the ongoing preservation and increased access to the testimonies. In 2007, the USC Shoah Foundation began partnering with other organizations to expand the Visual History Archive to include other genocides and mass atrocities, including the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Cambodian genocide, the Armenian genocide, the Nanjing Massacre, the Guatemalan genocide, and testimonies related to the South Sudan Civil War, the Central African Republic, anti-Rohingya mass violence, and experiences of contemporary antisemitism. Today, the Visual History Archive continues to grow in two ways: through the collection of new testimonies, often with local partners, and through partnership with other institutions who deposit their testimonies in the Visual History Archive. Today the Visual History Archive contains almost 55,000 testimonies, collected in 65 countries and 43 languages. 

If you would like to obtain copies of testimonies for interviewees and family members, license footage and images from testimonies, and/or license a collection of testimonies, please contact [Access Services](https://sfiaccess.usc.edu/). 

The Visual History Archive contains over 115,000 hours of testimony, the equivalent of 13 years of material. Safeguarding this material has been a primary aim of the USC Shoah Foundation since its inception. Between 1994 and 1999, the USC Shoah Foundation recorded interviews on 235,005 Betacam SP videotapes. All physical media storage experiences data rot at some point in time. Conservative estimates were that videotapes would have a 20-year shelf life, and digital hard drives would have five years before visual content would show signs of age-related damage. In a rapidly changing technology landscape, the USC Shoah Foundation faced challenges of how to safeguard the testimonies in perpetuity. In 2008, with funding from the USC Office of the Provost and Oracle, the USC Shoah Foundation began a four-year, multimillion-dollar effort to digitally preserve the interviews in its Visual History Archive. Tapes were transferred from the storage facility in the eastern United States and processed to generate copies in a digital format called Motion JPEG 2000, which captures the picture and sound quality of the master recordings. In addition to generating Motion JPEG 2000 duplicates of the testimonies for preservation, the Institute generated other copies in commonly used formats such as MPEG, QuickTime, Flash, and Windows Media Player. These digital files are continuously checked and analyzed for signs of potential damage. A robot continuously loads each cartridge containing the digital files into a reader and analyzes the files for any signs of data damage or disruption. If there are any signs of damage, that piece of storage is trashed. No media is saved for more than three years and every piece of the archive is inspected every six months. Constantly checking and migrating the data ensures its longevity. When the USC Shoah Foundation discovered that nearly 5,000 testimonies had technical or mechanical issues, such as video dropout or flickering or audio problems, it assembled a restoration team, which developed proprietary software to manage workflow of the massive effort to fix image quality problems. The team developed a technique of breaking down the video into still images, isolating and removing the ‘bad’ images, and replicating very similar ‘good’ images to fill the gaps. In addition, the restoration team repaired physical damage, such as broken tape casings and missing pins, springs, or clips. In some cases, entire tapes must be re-threaded onto new cassettes, or pieces from several cassettes are combined onto one working cassette so that a testimony could be digitally preserved and shared. The USC Shoah Foundation established four mirror sites for the Visual History Archive, guaranteeing that a fully-functional Visual History Archive will exist in perpetuity outside its home at the University of Southern California. Three mirror sites are located in the United States and one site is in Europe. Mirror sites house the Visual History Archive on computer robots similar to the ones that store the original collection at USC. In addition, a high-speed connection to the Visual History Archive computers at USC allows these universities to ingest new testimonies, execute updates, refresh and write tapes, and more – up until now, tasks that could only be performed at USC. Mirror sites ensure that if the original Visual History Archive at USC were damaged or destroyed, an identical archive would still exist elsewhere in the world. 

On the public internet, desktop computers and mobile devices can search the entire Visual History Archive and view around 4,000 video testimonies. The full VHA, containing 55,000 testimonies, is accessible only at subscribing educational and research institutions.