U-M will operate as gateway to Shoah Holocaust archives

The University Library has entered a partnership with the Shoah Foundation that will make the videotaped testimonies of 52,000 Holocaust survivors available to the general public for the first time.

Movie director and producer Steven Spielberg created the Los Angeles-based foundation 10 years ago to capture for posterity the stories of Holocaust victims and eyewitnesses.

U-M was chosen to be a portal to the Shoah Visual History Archive (VHA) database, partly because of its ability to provide the intensive computing environment needed to manage the massive multimedia files that make up the collection.

The Shoah VHA consists of digitized copies of 52,000 videotaped interviews with extensive indexing. This makes it possible to search the material using more than 30,000 geographic and experiential keywords. The archive, drawing on material from 56 countries in 32 languages, can be searched by many terms, including a specific first or last name, topic, or group of people.

The visual testimonies come from nine survivor and witness experience groups who lived under the rule of the Nazis or other Axis powers. All experienced persecution and/or the exclusionist policies of the Nazi regime. The groups include homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews, political prisoners, rescuers and aid providers, Sinti and Roma (gypsies) survivors, liberators and liberation witnesses, survivors of eugenics policies and war crimes trials participants.

More than 90 percent of the interviewees are Jewish.

The full database is at the Shoah Foundation. The public will be able to access materials from computers in any of U-M's 19 libraries via Internet2 — a fast, super-high bandwidth Internet connection that can transmit multimedia material at real-time speeds.

"The Shoah Archive's appeal will transcend campus needs and will be sought after by members of the community," says Brenda Johnson, associate University librarian for public services. "The University Library will be working with the Shoah Foundation to broaden access for others in the state to this unique resource."

Henry Greenspan, lecturer in U-M's Residential College, says the archive offers unique capabilities for study: "As someone especially interested in psychological dimensions of survivors' experiences, I was glad to see that the index includes a number of items of psychological relevance. It becomes possible to compare, quite quickly, the wide range of ways people speak about loss, or rage, or guilt and so on."

Because of the size of the collection, approximately 200 testimonies are immediately accessible via U-M computers. Others sought from the archive will be viewable within 24 hours.

U-M faculty are reviewing the archive for use in classes beginning as early as fall 2005. Possible areas include Jewish studies, language studies that would examine the native languages used by those interviewed, film and video production techniques, and techniques for oral and visual histories.

"The Shoah Archive greatly enriches the teaching and research resources of the University," says Todd Endelman, director of U-M's Judaic Studies Program. "Faculty and students in history, literature, political science, Jewish studies and other areas will be able to access its vast storehouse of memories and reflections with ease due to the finely-tuned electronic finding aid that comes with it. I envision its use in both undergraduate teaching and graduate and faculty research."

It also is possible to compare what the same survivors have said and written about their experience at different times, Greenspan says.

"It becomes possible through this Shoah partnership to compare what people say and how they say it in one testimony context with another. Those questions about how survivors retell, impact of context, and range of emotional responses are very much part of my undergraduate teaching."

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