New Database

Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive

The USC Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive (VHA) is a web-based tool that allows users to search the archive of visual testimonies collected by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education. The archive includes nearly 52,000 testimonies from survivors and witnesses to the Nazi Holocaust. It uses more than 50,000 experiential and geographic indexing terms to find relevant video. The VHA also allows searching of extracts from the Pre-Interview Questionnaires and by names of interviewees and the names of people they reference in their testimony.

This VHA tool permits students, staff and faculty to identify both whole testimonies of relevance as well as specific segments within testimonies that relate to their area of interest. At this time, the VHA is available through the USC Shoah Foundation Institute in Los Angeles and at select universities in the United States through high-speed research networks. The Renaissance Computing Institute makes the archive available to the Triangle Universities: University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Duke University and North Carolina State University.