Some of the events of World War II were so shocking that the Shoah Foundation was started by Hollywood director, Steven Spielberg, to put a human face on the statistics. Compiled for educational use to help overcome prejudice, intolerance and bigotry, the Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive contains nearly 52,000 videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses. The testimonies are from people who lived under the rule of the Nazis or other Axis powers and experienced persecution and/or the discriminatory policies of the Nazi regime - over 90 percent are Jewish.
Stored in a digital format - MPEG files - the information has been captured just as it was delivered, in 32 different languages. The files are stored in the Visual History Archive database in Los Angeles, California, and at 180 terabytes, has become one of the biggest non-military databases in the world. If a person watched the video testimonies one by one, it would take over 160 months to complete viewing them all.
In recent years, digital libraries within many universities have become central in the discussion of how to put vast volumes of data together in a way that makes sense, and deliver the appropriate data in an efficient way. Since the Shoah Foundation’s priority is to see this important historical archive incorporated into curricula, it turned to Rice University, University of Southern California (USC) and Yale University to help develop some test projects that would leverage the Visual History Archive into their learning environments. The goal was not to create new courses but to identify classes that would benefit from this information and develop ways to integrate portions of the video testimony into existing instructional frameworks.
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