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The USC Shoah Foundation is today releasing a complete redesign of its Visual History Archive (VHA), the world’s largest collection of primary video testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides.
Created in 1999 as a one-terabyte cache of Holocaust survivor testimony, the VHA has since transformed into a collection of more than 55,000 interviews—an invaluable resource for researchers and educators, students, filmmakers, policymakers, and journalists, as well as the Global Programs Foundation of the USC Shoah Foundation.
VHA’s UI redesign brings a host of improvements: a modern look and feel; greater ability to share with other researchers; integration into other USC Shoah Foundation interfaces; faster, wider and more seamless access to content; transcripts, as well as cataloging and improved mobile capabilities. Together, these new features allow users to find, view, store and engage with survivor and witness testimonies with unprecedented ease.
Sam Gustman, chief technology officer of the USC Shoah Foundation, said that improvements in Internet infrastructure over the past two decades have enabled an “incredibly inventive” redesign of the VHA.
“We were able to envision and implement this new interface because we are no longer limited by the capacity of Internet streaming networks,” Gustman said. “The result is an incredible new resource that humanizes testimony in a way that has never been possible before.”
As with its previous iteration, the new VHA interface is available through ProQuest, one of the world’s largest research database distributors. ProQuest maintains relationships with over 26,000 libraries in over 150 countries, reaching more than 130 million students and universities worldwide.
Along with Holocaust testimonies, the VHA contains first-hand accounts by survivors and witnesses of the Armenian Genocide, the genocides in Cambodia, the Central African Republic, Guatemala, the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, the Nanjing Massacre, and, most recently, ethnic violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar, the Yazidis in northern Iraq, the Kurds in northern Syria and the current anti-Semitic violence.
USC Shoah Foundation Finci-Viterbi Executive Director Robert Williams said the redesigned VHA continues the Institute’s founding promise to survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides.
“Through its programming and innovation, the USC Shoah Foundation has long been at the forefront of the ethical use of technology to acquire, preserve, and provide access to the testimonies of survivors,” said Dr. Williams. “This is essential because technology is often the means by which we see the world, and it is a mechanism by which we can continue to learn from Survivors long after they can no longer be with us in person.”
The new VHA comes at the end of a multifaceted five-year initiative focused on expanding sustainable access worldwide to the evidence, Lee Lieberman’s Visual History Archive Program.
Lee Lieberman AM, who recently stepped down from the Chair of the Institute after a successful term as Chair of the Institute’s Board of Advisors, said the new VHA will increase engagement with audiences and strengthen engagement – both prerequisites for combating prejudice, intolerance and hatred through education and community building – at a particularly critical time.
“Tens of thousands of survivors gathered the courage to share their painful and remarkable stories with the Institute because they wanted the world to remember what happens when a culture of intolerance goes unchallenged,” Lieberman said.
“In the face of the terrifying resurgence of anti-Semitism, nativism and xenophobia, we must heed their repeated individual and collective messages to prevent hatred from casting its dark shadows over humanity again.”
Lieberman’s $5 million foundational gift launched has attracted other major donors to the project, including the Koret Foundation and Crown Family Philanthropy.
Jeff Farber, CEO of the Koret Foundation, praised the power of testimony to develop empathy and counter prejudice.
“Personal stories and the survivor’s perspective are one of the best educational tools for teaching about the Holocaust,” Farber said. “We are proud to partner with the Lee Lieberman Foundation to transform the way people access and interact with testimonies, in hopes that we will build a more tolerant society and an inclusive future.”
The new interface is available at vha.usc.edu. After today’s launch, the legacy VHA will no longer be available.
Click here to watch these VHA introductory videos and access the FAQ: https://vha.usc.edu/help
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