University of Southern California LibGuides - USC Shoah Foundation Institute Visual History Archive

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the USC Shoah Foundation Institute?

See History.

What is the Visual History Archive?

The Visual History Archive (VHA) is the search tool that allows users to search and browse the entire collection of video testimonies gathered by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. It is based here at USC.

Is the VHA on the internet?

No, the VHA is not accessible over the public internet. Instead it is made available via Internet2, a secure broadband network shared by a consortium of educational and research institutions. Institutions that are part of Internet2 (or its equivalent) may subscribe to the archive. Currently, the VHA can be viewed at these locations worldwide.

I am a USC student (staff/faculty member). How can I watch a testimony?

See Search the VHA.

I am not a USC student (staff/faculty member). How can I watch a testimony?

See Search the VHA.

How can I get a copy of a testimony?

See VHA Copies & Downloads.

How many interviews are there in the VHA?

Nearly 52,000 video interviews. In total the VHA contains approximately 105,000 hours, or 12 years, of continuous video.

When did you conduct the interviews?

Between 1994 and 1999.

Where were they collected?

In 56 different countries. See Collecting Interviews Worldwide.

Did you only interview in English?

No, we took interviews in 32 different languages. English was the largest language, with close to 25,000 interviews. See Collecting Interviews Worldwide.

Did you only interview Jewish Holocaust survivors?

No, the VHA contains nine different interviewee experience groups:

Jewish survivors (approx. 95%)
homosexual survivors
Jehovah's Witnesses
liberators and liberation witnesses
political prisoners
rescue and aid providers
Sinti and Roma survivors
survivor of eugenics policies
war crimes trials participants

Which is the longest interview in the VHA?

At just under 16 hours, the longest interview in the VHA is that of Mosheh Beyski (interview code 23848, Hebrew), a Schindler survivor and later a supreme court judge in Israel.

Who is the oldest interviewee in the VHA?

The oldest interviewee, born in 1892, is Frida Rosenbaum (interview code 7335, Dutch). She was 103 when she gave her testimony.

The most popular year of birth for VHA interviewees is 1924.

In terms of age distribution, there is an equal split: roughly one third were adults, one third teenagers, and one third children when the war began in 1939.

How were the interviews conducted?

See The Interview.

How is the archive preserved?

See Preserving the Archive.

Do you have transcripts for the testimonies?

No, instead of transcribing, we cataloged and indexed them fully.

How did you catalog and index the testimonies?

The Shoah Foundation Institute created proprietary software for cataloging and indexing. We devised keywords to meet the needs of the collection’s content and organized them into a keyword thesaurus conforming to standard practice. The thesaurus evolved over time and grew in volume as the testimonies were indexed. It currently contains more than 55,000 keywords, some 90% of which are geographic in nature.

Cataloging refers to the data-entry of the pre-interview questionnaires (PIQs), documents filled out by the interviewer and interviewee before each interview that provide basic biographical information about the interviewee and his/her family.

Indexing refers to the minute-by-minute indexing of the video interviews. To do this, each interview was divided into one-minute segments Then, indexers assigned keywords to the relevant segments. This process is like book indexing but where the keyword refers to the particular minute of an interview where that subject was discussed, rather than to a page of a book.

For more details, see Cataloguing and Indexing.

Are there other places that have interviewed Holocaust survivors?

Yes, many of them. A list of them can be found here.