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.

In the summer of 2012, after a four-year, multimillion-dollar effort to preserve digitally the video interviews in its Visual History Archive, the USC Shoah Foundation discovered that 4,755 testimonies had technical or mechanical issues, such as video dropout or flickering, or audio problems.

Winter seminar focuses on future of survivor testimonyRepresentatives from more than 30 Holocaust museums and centers in the United States and Canada came to Los Angeles this week for the 2013 Association of Holocaust Organizations (AHO) Winter Seminar, hosted for the first time by USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education.

Nine months into USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive Restoration project, technology staff have finished restoring nearly one third of the damaged tapes in the Visual History Archive.

Damaged videotapes in the Visual History Archive, previously thought to be unfixable, are being restored thanks to new software developed by USC Shoah Foundation technology staff.

In an effort to safeguard a narrative that began with the 1994 creation of the USC Shoah Foundation, Information Technology Services (ITS) has launched the process of digitizing the USC Shoah Foundation Institutional Audio-Visual Records.

Auschwitz should never have existed, so why are we so keen to cling onto it? Would it not be reasonable to scrub it from the landscape, remove the very thought of what it represents from our minds, recognize it as the cemetery it is, then grass it over and leave the dead to rest in peace?  

USC Shoah Foundation is currently fundraising for New Dimensions in Testimony, a new project being developed in concert with USC Institute for Creative Technologies and Conscience Display. The project is to capture three-dimensional interviews with a number of survivors so that in the future people will enable to engage with them conversationally.