News Release

UNC-Chapel Hill gains access to world's largest
video archive of holocaust survivor interviews

CHAPEL HILL - Students, faculty and staff at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will have access to what is thought to be the world's largest visual history this month, when the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) deploys a 5.5-terabyte digital media cache of testimonies from the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation Institute's Visual History Archive.

The archive includes nearly 52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses collected in 32 languages and from 56 countries by the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. About 90 percent of the interviews are with Jewish survivors of Nazi persecution, but political prisoners, Roma and Sinti (Gypsy) survivors, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, liberators, witnesses, rescuers and aid providers also provided testimony.

"These interviews are an important educational source that can enrich courses in the social sciences, humanities, arts and sciences," said RENCI Director Dan Reed. "Even more important, the archive is a testament to the millions who suffered in the Holocaust and a lesson for the present. In a sense, the archive brings together the international community of scholars so that all of us can learn from this tragedy and ultimately learn to treasure diversity and embrace it as a strength."

The USC Shoah Foundation Institute is the successor to the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg to document the experiences of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. With a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a pilot program allowed faculty and students at USC, Rice University, Yale University and the University of Michigan to access the entire archive over the high-speed Internet2 research network. That pilot program has expanded to include additional universities connected to Internet2, including UNC-Chapel Hill through the agreement with RENCI.

"The visual history archive contains what is by far the largest collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies to be found anywhere in the world," said Chris Browning, Frank Porter Graham professor of history in Carolina’s College of Arts and Sciences. "To make this material readily available to researchers on our campus - whether faculty, graduate students, or undergraduates - is a tremendous service. For my current research project on a complex of factory slave labor camps in southern Poland, I have had to travel as far as Warsaw and Jerusalem to collect materials. Now, a major source for my work will be readily accessible here on campus."

"Scholars have discovered that because of the archive's chronological reach and geographic breadth, the materials in the archive support research on virtually every aspect of 20th century history," said historian and USC Shoah Foundation Institute Executive Director Douglas Greenberg. "We are thrilled that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will be one of the institutions to provide this resource to its students, educators and scholars."

Entry to the visual history archive requires access to UNC-Chapel Hill's computer network. The database is searchable by more than 50,000 geographic and experiential keywords, the names of each person mentioned in the testimonies and each of the interviewees' biographical information. Testimonies not already available on the local cache can be requested for upload from the Los Angeles-based archive.

RENCI also plans to apply its expertise in advanced visualization techniques to the archive, creating visual displays of the archive's metadata that intuitively show relationships among people, places and events and allow users to extract more meaning from the data, Reed said.

"Visualization is simply a different way to present information, and it often can reveal relationships and patterns in the data that weren't apparent before," said Ray Idaszak, RENCI's director of collaborative environments. "Visualization is one way to mine information out of data. By applying some of these techniques to the visual history archive we can enhance an already valuable tool."

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RENCI contact: Karen Green, (919) 445-9648, (919) 619-8213 (mobile) or kgreen@renci.org
UNC News Services contact: Clinton Colmenares, (919) 843-1991, clinton_colmenares@unc.edu
USC Shoa Foundation Institute contact: Talia Cohen, (213) 220-8783