USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education

Douglas Greenberg is the executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, which is a part of the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

A member of USC's Department of History, Greenberg is chairman of the California Council on the Humanities and has taught history courses at Princeton, Rutgers, and Lawrence Universities. Formerly CEO of the Chicago Historical Society and vice president of the American Council of Learned Societies, he writes about early American history, the Holocaust, public history, and the impact of technology on scholarship in the humanities.

Sam Gustman is the chief technology officer of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. In addition to leading the effort to preserve and provide access to the institute's digital archives, Gustman serves as a consultant to organizations-such as the Library of Congress, the Recording Academy, and DreamWorks-that work with technology to provide digital audio and video access, security, and preservation.

In 1994, after filming Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to document the experience of survivors and other witnesses to the Holocaust, including those who aided, rescued, and liberated the survivors. With a collection of nearly 52,000 video testimonies collected in 32 languages and 56 countries, the institute's archive is the largest visual history archive in the world, requiring 200 terabytes of storage.

The Shoah Foundation became the USC Shoah Foundation Institute in 2006. Its mission is to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry-and the suffering they cause-through the educational use of the institute's visual history testimonies. Relying upon partnerships with institutions around the world, the institute uses its unique resources to support scholarship and teaching that promote tolerance.

Greenberg, Gustman, and their colleagues use HPCC resources to support the study of the humanities in innovative ways. Since 2003, HPCC has participated in a set of technology projects funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the California State Library, and other funders to deliver the entire collection of video testimony and descriptive metadata to Yale, Rice, the University of Michigan, and USC. In 2006, when the Shoah Foundation became a part of USC, HPCC facilitated the transfer of the archive to storage systems and servers at USC, which are now managed as part of the USC production environment by Information Technology Services (ITS). In 2006, the pilot program will be extended to at least ten new institutions, including universities in Australia through Pacific Wave and universities in Germany and the United States through Internet2.

USC Shoah Foundation Institute educational programs reach nearly two million students in the United States and elsewhere around the world. Currently, 56 visual history collections can be viewed at locations in 18 countries. For information about the Shoah Foundation, visit www.usc.edu/vhi.