Issue: Winter 2005

Editor’s Note

As we were going to press, news flashed around the world that the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation – founded by Steven Spielberg after the filming of Schindler’s List to collect and preserve testimonies of the survivors of the Holocaust – will become part of the University of Southern California in January 2006.

Under the arrangement, the Shoah Foundation’s repository of 52,000 testimonies of survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust will be transferred to USC in perpetuity. In addition, the new USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education will be established in USC College and dedicated to research and scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, as well as educational outreach.

The Shoah Foundation’s repository of testimonies – the largest visual history archive in the world – is remarkable in and of itself, but also because of the extraordinary digital indexing technology the Foundation developed. This technology allows searching to take place as though the videos were text, thus making the richness and detail of each story available to scholars and others around the world.

As you will read in this issue’s cover story, the USC libraries are also deeply involved in the digitizing and sharing of information; in fact, USC had already used a 2003 Mellon Foundation grant to help connect the Shoah Foundation’s video archive to the next-generation, high-speed Internet2 network. USC has been a leader in the development of digital libraries, and its Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Library, along with the university’s Digital Archive, provides state-of-the-art technological resources for preserving these archival materials and for providing access for researchers and scholars from around the world.

In announcing the Shoah Foundation’s move to USC, Spielberg, who is a USC trustee, said: “Preservation of these priceless interviews is the Shoah Foundation’s highest priority, and our move to USC ensures both preservation and access.”

– Susan Heitman