In the nineteen nineties, videotape was the most effective format on which to record the testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses. But like all physical storage media, tape has a shelf life, and in 2008 the Institute and USC Information Technology Services (ITS) started a multimillion-dollar project to digitize the entire Visual History Archive.

USC Shoah Foundation and the Armenian Film Foundation have announced a new joint goal: By the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide in 2015, they will integrate into the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive the more than 400 interviews of survivors of the genocide that were filmed by the late Dr. J.

Testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide added to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive have resulted in 500 new search terms for the archive’s indexing system. The index is a controlled vocabulary of more than 50,000 terms that make up the Shoah Foundation’s Thesaurus and that allow detailed searching of the testimonies in the archive.

Professor Andrea Pető of Central European University in Budapest has written an article about how to use USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive in teaching students at the graduate level. The piece appears as a chapter in the seventh volume of Jewish Studies at the Central European University edited by András Kovács and Michael Laurence Miller.

Four applied mathematics undergraduate students are dedicating their summer to a major research project for the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

“We are convinced that access to this unique archive will promote research and teaching on the history of Thessaloniki and the Holocaust,” said Yannis Mylopoulos, Rector of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. “Aristotle University of Thessaloniki is proud to support efforts directed toward honoring and commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, especially the Jewish Community of Thessaloniki and its victims during the World War II.”

The History Meeting House in Warsaw has become the first institution in Poland to offer full access to the Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education.  Nearly 52,000 videotaped testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses, recorded in 56 countries and in 32 languages—mostly between 1994 and 1999—can now be remotely accessed via an online interface that allows searching and viewing the fully indexed video and related metadata.

USC Shoah Foundation, Aegis Trust Rwanda and the Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) conducted a feasibility study this month to determine how case files from trials of genocide perpetrators could be digitized and preserved.