Watch CTO Sam Gustman’s Talk at American Libraries Association Conference on Saturday

USC Shoah Foundation Chief Technology Officer Sam Gustman will give a talk at the annual American Libraries Association conference this Saturday in Chicago.

If you’re not going to the conference, you can still watch the presentation. ProQuest will live stream Gustman’s talk on its Facebook page Saturday, June 24 from 3-4 p.m. CDT.

Gustman’s presentation is titled “Preserving Stories Through Technology: The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive” and will cover the archive and the technology used to build and maintain it, which has been adopted by USC Libraries and other organizations to digitize, catalog, and preserve collections.

ProQuest partnered with USC Shoah Foundation in 2016 to become the exclusive distributor of the Visual History Archive to colleges and universities around the world. Access to the Visual History Archive through ProQuest no longer requires a high-speed Internet2 connection; access will be available via the standard Internet creating a contemporary streaming experience. The two organizations are currently creating a new interface that will be launched in 2017.

The partnership with ProQuest is also allowing for archival-quality transcripts of all 53,000 testimonies. This massive endeavor will complement the Institute’s indexing methods and further refine the process of searching testimonies for specific points of interest.

Gustman has been chief technology officer of USC Shoah Foundation since 1994 and was responsible for overseeing the 2006 move of the foundation's archives from Universal Studios to USC. Gustman is associate dean at the USC Libraries, where he holds a faculty appointment and oversees all technology for 23 USC Libraries. Sam provides technical leadership for the integration of the USC Shoah Foundation's digital archives into USC's collection of electronic resources, ensuring the archive's accessibility for academic and research communities at USC and around the world. He is responsible for the operations, preservation, and cataloging of the institute's 8-petabyte digital library, one of the largest public video databases in the world. 

The American Libraries Association (ALA)’s annual conference and exhibition brings together librarians, authors, publishers, business professionals, educators and students to share knowledge and discuss the future of the library industry.