Kigali Genocide Memorial Center Researching Potential for Rwandan Genocide Archive Center

USC Shoah Foundation director of technology Anita Pace is spending the week in Rwanda to work with Kigali Genocide Memorial Center (KGMC) staff on the possibility of building KGMC its own Genocide Archive Center.

The center would be modeled after USC Shoah Foundation’s own Visual History Archive Center, which digitizes, preserves and stores its 52,000 audiovisual testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust and other genocides and provides access to the testimonies to institutions around the world.

While in Kigali, Pace said she will become familiar from a data network technical perspective what KGMC and its technology partners have in terms of architecture, data storage capacity and technical expertise.

The goal of the week is to determine how Pace and KGMC can build out KGMC’s capabilities for digitizing and sharing testimonies.

The team will discuss how genocide testimonies could be digitized, and the steps toward building a file system to store testimonies at a facility in Rwanda for public and private use in education and general access.

They will also consider how to build a Genocide Visual Archive website with board network access across multiple platforms for use in memorial centers, universities and middle schools, and how to build out the network architecture in Rwanda to provide the access required.

The group will develop a plan to look at the phases of implementation and costs to build out KGMC as an Archival, Documentation, Educational Access Center.