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Researchers can search the Shoah Foundation’s digital Visual History Archive using a software application developed by the Foundation that allows identification and viewing of testimonies - and testimony segments - that are most pertinent. Searching is conducted using basic biographical information (cataloguing data) or an extensive system of geographic and experiential keywords (indexing metadata). The basic biographical information can be searched using the Testimony Catalogue. A version of the Testimony Catalogue is available on the Shoah Foundation’s website (www.vhf.org/testimonycatalogue). Currently, more than one-half of the archive is indexed, and the majority of the testimonies are catalogued. The cataloguing and indexing of the remaining testimonies will be complete in 2005.
The Visual History Archive can be accessed at the Shoah Foundation’s Tapper Research and Testing Center in Los Angeles, California. The center is open to teachers, researchers, and students by appointment. Researchers can also access the Shoah Foundation archive via Internet2 at three other locations in the United States: at Yale University in New Haven, CT; at Rice University in Houston, TX; and at University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA.
To schedule a visit at the Tapper Research & Testing Center in Los Angeles or at one of the universities above, please contact the Shoah Foundation Access Department staff by telephone at (818) 777-6869 or by email at scholars@vhf.org. For more information about the Shoah Foundation archive, visit our website at www.vhf.org.
The Shoah Visual History Foundation has collected nearly 52,000 videotaped testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other Holocaust eyewitnesses in 56 countries and in 32 languages. The majority of the testimonies in the archive are from Jewish survivors; however, the archive also includes testimonies from homosexual survivors, Jehovah’s Witness survivors, liberators and liberation witnesses, political prisoners, rescuers and aid providers, Sinti and Roma survivors, survivors of eugenics policies, and war crimes trials participants.
Note: The Shoah Foundation does not maintain a circulation library.
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