Visual History Archive

The Visual History Archive contains over 116,000 hours of testimony, the equivalent of 13 years of material. Safeguarding this material has been a primary aim of the USC Shoah Foundation since its inception.

If you watched all of the 55,000 testimonies in the Visual History Archive back to back without stopping, it would take over 13 years to watch it all. With such a massive amount of material, the USC Shoah Foundation was faced with the challenge of how to make the testimonies accessible and searchable for users of the archive, including educators, scholars, and students. The organization developed a methodology and patented technology to catalog the material through the process of indexing. The Visual History Archive’s index is a controlled vocabulary that essentially operates like the index in the back of a book, except instead of pointing to a page in a book, it points to timecoded moments of testimony in which specific topics are discussed, making the archive searchable down to the minute. Indexing is foundational to the archive’s architecture and search.