John Silvester
Vice Provost for Scholarly Technology
University of Southern California
Sam Gustman
Director of Technology
Shoah Foundation
Judith A. Truelson
Associate Professor of Librarianship
University of Southern California
Mike Pearce
Deputy CIO
University of Southern California
Since 1994, the Shoah Foundation (http://www.vhf.org) has recorded on videotape the personal memories of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. The mission of the Shoah Foundation is to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry – and the suffering they cause – through the educational use of the Foundation’s visual history testimonies. The Foundation pursues this mission by forging partnerships to support its strategic goals of developing educational products and programs and enabling access to the archive. As part of a Mellon grant project, USC’s Information Services Division (ISD) has provided access to the Shoah Visual History Foundation testimonies remotely taking advantage of advanced networks such as Internet2. USC has explored the scholarly uses of the archive in research and instructional programs and studied the impact on pedagogy and the impact on structures of library and information services support.
Large-scale archives like these testimonies present many technical challenges for the institutions hosting them, including mass storage design, collection architecture and metadata design, access control and authentication. In this session, three presenters will present an introduction to the testimonies, the information services challenges and opportunities, and the technical challenges of this important collection.
