Administrative
History
In April 1994, film director Steven Spielberg established the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organization, with the mission to collect and preserve on videotape the firsthand accounts of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. Spielberg and the founding staff settled on the concrete goal to collect at least 50,000 testimonies. This number was based on a variety of estimates, including the extent of the remaining survivor population, the percentage of survivors and other witnesses who might come forward to give testimony, and the financial resources available to undertake the project. Furthermore, it was hoped that a collection of this size would offer both depth and breadth in documenting virtually every type of Holocaust survivor and witness experience.
Because
the Shoah Foundation's offices were located in the Los Angeles
area, the first interviews were conducted locally. The first test
interview took place on April 18, 1994, and full-scale interviewing
began that July. The
Foundation soon expanded its interviewing effort first to
other parts of the United States and then abroad, opening regional offices in many cities around
the world and recruiting more than 2,300 interviewers and 1,000 videographers
to organize and conduct the interviews. In January
1999, the Foundation collected the 50,000th testimony and began winding down its interviewing
operation. In all, it recorded close
to 52,000 interviews in 56 countries and in 32 languages.
To open up the vast well of research material contained in the testimonies, the Shoah Foundation started cataloguing and indexing the testimonies in 1995. Basic biographical information about each interviewee was catalogued from pre-interview questionnaires. The video interviews were then indexed, with electronic subject keywords being applied to the relevant minutes of the interview in which those subjects were discussed. Throughout this time, as the original interview tapes arrived at the Foundation, digital copies were made. By the end of 2005, more than 51,100 interviews had been digitized and catalogued, while nearly 49,000 had been fully indexed. Today, users can browse biographical data using the online Testimony Catalogue and can explore the video interviews and accompanying metadata using the Visual History Archive, available at USC and subscribing institutions worldwide.
In January 2006, the Foundation and its archive became part of the University of Southern California. The USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education and USC Libraries Special Collections now share resources to maintain, develop, and promote public access to the Visual History Archive.
