Two Thousand Testimonies Added to Visual History Archive, Thousands of New Students and Teachers Using IWitness in 2016-2017 Fiscal Year

A comparison of USC Shoah Foundation’s fiscal year-end stats from 2016 and 2017 reveals the Institute’s ever-increasing impact around the world.

From July 2016 to July 2017, 2,000 testimonies were added to the Visual History Archive, including Holocaust testimonies from collections in Canada and across the United States, the final Armenian Genocide testimonies from the Armenian Film Foundation collection, Cambodian Genocide, Nanjing Massacre and Guatemalan Genocide testimonies. The new testimonies resulted in the addition of 1,158 new keywords to the Visual History Archive’s thesaurus.

USC Shoah Foundation and its distribution partner ProQuest welcomed a whopping 30 new VHA full access sites this year alone, bringing the total number of sites around the world that have full access to the Visual History Archive to 85. To put this in perspective, from 2013-2016, 11 new sites started subscriptions to the archive.

The new access sites include three universities in Australia, Princeton, University of Kent (UK), and nine Holocaust and oral history institutions (plus two colleges) in Canada.

A total of 72 university courses were taught using the Visual History Archive throughout the year and 20 new scholarly books and articles cited testimonies from the archive.

Just over 4,000 educators and 29,000 students joined IWitness this year, including the first members from nine new countries (Latvia, Slovenia, and Guatemala, to name a few). Factoring in IWitness, Echoes and Reflections and all USC Shoah Foundation’s educational outreach, the Institute reached 12,217 teachers and 1,098,457 students throughout the year.

Finally, USC Shoah Foundation’s social media platforms continue to grow. The Institute added 1,605 Facebook friends and 2,068 Twitter followers this year. And just over two years since it joined Instagram, the Institute’s account boasts 1,877 followers.