Stephen Smith and Hayk Demoyan, directors of USC Shoah Foundation and the Armenian Genocide Museum & Institute, respectively, came together today to sign a memorandum of understanding that paves the way for future collaboration between the two organizations.

Just two weeks ago, USC Shoah Foundation launched its Armenian Genocide Collection in the Visual History Archive; now, 12 of those initial 60 testimonies are already available for students and educators to view in IWitness.

“The Extermination of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire” will be used by scholars and and researchers currently indexing testimonies of Armenian Genocide survivors.

USC Shoah Foundation published 185 Armenian Genocide testimonies in the Visual History Archive on Friday, nearly tripling the size of the Institute’s Armenian Genocide collection.

Aleksan Markaryan’s crystal-clear memory of the genocide against the Armenian people in 1915 has given him the distinction of being the last survivor interviewed by the Armenian Film Foundation for its collection of Armenian Genocide survivor and witness testimonies.

Diana Hekimian, an active member of the Armenian community in Los Angeles, found an original copy of one of the earliest reports of the 1915 genocide in Armenia: "The Diyarbekir Massacres and Kurdish Atrocities," by Thomas Mugerditchian.

USC Shoah Foundation on Monday Mar. 27 and on Friday Mar. 31 celebrated the completion of a years-long endeavor to integrate hundreds of testimonies from the Armenian Genocide into the Visual History Archive.

Hailed by some as a milestone in Ottoman Empire scholarship, the new book “Armenians in Ottoman Turkey, 1914” was the product of a manuscript that was donated to the Institute’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research in 2016. It will be a boon for testimony indexers and other researchers at the Institute.