2015

USC Shoah Foundation, Discovery Education and World Jewish Congress partner to support the official observance of the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz with “Auschwitz: The Past is Present,” a global communication and education program.

The Center for Advanced Genocide Research receives its first primary-source acquisition when attorney Vartkes Yeghiayan donates over 40 boxes of documents from the historic Martin Marootian et al. v. New York Life Insurance Company class action lawsuit.

The first 60 testimonies of the Armenian Genocide Collection are indexed and integrated into the Visual History Archive on April 24, 2015 – the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide.

New Dimensions in Testimony, that will permit students far into the future to “talk” with Holocaust survivors about their life experiences, launched its first pilot installation at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.

USC Shoah Foundation begins digitizing and indexing Holocaust testimony collections from San Francisco, Houston, Toronto and Montreal as part of its Preserving the Legacy initiative.

Testimonies in the Visual History Archive reach over 3.6 million people worldwide, including students, teachers, scholars and the community at large.

USC Shoah Foundation’s educational outreach programs reach 4.3 million students and 46,000 educators over the past year.

2014

President Barack Obama receives the Ambassador for Humanity Award at the 20th anniversary Ambassadors for Humanity gala in Los Angeles.

The Institute establishes
 the Center for Advanced Genocide Research to serve as its research and scholarship unit. 
The Center will study how and why instances of mass violence occur.

Center for Advanced Genocide Research hosts conference titled "Memory, Media and Technology: Exploring the Trajectories of Schindler's List," attended by scholars from around the world.

The initial 12 testimonies of the Nanjing Massacre collection are integrated into the Visual History Archive.

The first IWitness Video Challenge winner is Ruth Hernandez, a ninth-grader from Philadelphia whose video, "Voices of Our Journey," traces parallels between Holocaust survivors and modern-day immigrants.

Access to the full Visual History Archive is available at 49 institutions, with regional collections at 199 institutions, in 33 countries.

More than 400 university courses have incorporated testimony from the Visual History Archive.

More than 23,000 educators and students in all 50 United States and in 56 other countries are engaged in testimony-based education via IWitness.

Testimonies in the Visual History Archive reach more than 1.6 million people each year worldwide, including students, teachers, scholars, and the community at large.

2013

The first 65 testimonies of survivors of the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide are integrated into the Visual History Archive.

USC Shoah Foundation commemorates the 20th anniversary of the filming of Schindler’s List by launching the IWitness Video Challenge with founder Steven Spielberg.

The Visual History Archive integrates Google Maps to enhance testimony search by geographic location.

Access to the full Visual History Archive is available at 44 institutions, with regional collections at 195 institutions in 31 countries.

A total of 370 university courses have incorporated testimony from the Visual History Archive.

2012

VHA Online launches, enabling the public to search the Visual History Archive metadata and view of a selection of 1,000 English-language testimonies.

IWitness receives the International Society for Technology in Education Seal of Alignment for Proficiency.

USC Shoah Foundation launches its two-year professional development program “Teaching with Testimony in the 21st Century” with more than 100 participants from the United States, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland.

Days of Remembrance video-on-demand series on Comcast offers ten of the Institute’s award-winning documentary films to global viewers.

The institute welcomes its first Yom HaShoah Scholar-in-Residence, Yehuda Bauer, of Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

2011

The entire Visual History Archive is digitally replicated and saved at a location outside the earthquake zone of Southern California.

The institute launches fellowship programs for senior scholars and doctoral fellows.

The institute publishes Visual History Archive in Practice.

The institute’s Student Voices Film Contest launches at USC; it encourages undergraduates to make short films based on testimony that address the themes of genocide and human rights.

2010

The Armenian Film Foundation and Dr. J. Michael Hagopian sign a historic agreement with the institute to digitize, preserve, and disseminate filmed interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Armenian Genocide.

The first International Digital Access, Outreach, and Research Conference convenes scholars from 25 institutions to discuss their use of the Visual History Archive.

Access to the full Visual History Archive is available at 26 institutions, with regional collections at 140 institutions in 29 countries.

A total of 200 university courses have incorporated testimony from the Visual History Archive.

2009

An IWitness prototype website is developed to provide compelling, testimony-based learning experiences for secondary education.

The institute launches its YouTube channel.

The institute’s Teacher Innovation Network and Master Teachers programs launch.

Three pilot interviews are conducted with Rwandan Tutsi genocide survivors in partnership with Kigali Genocide Memorial.

The institute convenes an international workshop in Budapest with ten countries represented, to advance best practices on the use of video testimony in education.

2008

Nearly 4,000 university students have enrolled in 137 university courses worldwide that have incorporated testimonies from the institute’s archive.

The institute partners with Documentation Center of Cambodia to support its testimony recording efforts and conduct pilot interviews with Cambodian survivors for the Visual History Archive.

The Faculty Advisory Council convenes 16 scholars to promote linkages with the institute at USC.

Access to the full Visual History Archive is available at 21 institutions, with 102 regional collections in 23 countries.

2007

Local organizations in Rwanda invite the institute to partner in collecting video testimonies of the Rwandan Tutsi Genocide.

The Corrie ten Boom scholars program begins, enabling postdoctoral scholars and dissertation candidates to conduct research at the institute for periods of one to six months.

Segments for the Classroom launches on the institute’s website, providing educators with testimony-clip reels that highlight a theme or historical event for use in curricula.

2006

The Shoah Foundation becomes part of the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at University of Southern California and is renamed USC Shoah Foundation—The Institute for Visual History and Education.

The documentaries Spell Your Name and I Only Wanted to Live premiere in Ukraine and Italy, respectively.

Creating Character, a free online educational resource, incorporates streaming video testimony in easy-to-use, downloadable character education lessons.

The Visual History Archive digital preservation system migrates to a state-of-the-art 200-terabyte digital disc array.

2005

The 49,000th testimony is indexed, making 95 percent of the collected testimonies digitally searchable.

Echoes & Reflections, a multimedia curriculum on the Holocaust for secondary school teachers in the United States, is launched in partnership with the Anti-Defamation League and Yad Vashem.

A total of 25 university courses incorporate testimony at Visual History Archive sites.

2004

The Shoah Foundation commemorates its tenth anniversary with the release of a new documentary, Voices from the List, and a new classroom video, Giving Voice, concurrently with the release of Schindler’s List on DVD.

The Shoah Foundation’s Visual History in the Classroom initiative brings six educational products to 54,000 schools, reaching 1.6 million students in 11 countries.

A regional collection of more than 1,000 testimonies is established at the Jewish Museum Berlin.

2003

The 25,000th testimony is indexed.

“Racism-Antiracism,” the first university course based on the Visual History Archive, is offered to students at Bárczi Gustáv College in Hungary.

The Shoah Foundation releases One Human Spirit, its first classroom video with accompanying study guide.

2002

A subscription service for universities and institutions is established to make the entire Visual History Archive available over Internet2, with the first connections made at Rice University, Yale University, and the University of Southern California.

The first regional collection is established at the Charleston County Public Library in South Carolina, with 28 testimonies of state residents.

A collection of Sinti and Roma Holocaust survivor testimonies opens at the Dokumentations und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma (Documentation and Culture Centre of the German Sinti and Roma) in Heidelberg.

2001

The Shoah Foundation adopts a new mission: To overcome prejudice intolerance, and bigotry— and the suffering they cause—through the educational use of its Visual History Archive.

The first teacher-training workshop on the use of visual history in the classroom is hosted in Los Angeles with educators from diverse areas throughout the United States.

The first national collection of testimonies is established at the Joods Historisch Museum in Amsterdam with more than 1,000 testimonies from the VHA related to the Dutch experience.

2000

The Pilot Education Initiative launches; over three years its examines the use of testimony-based educational products in five public school districts in California, Virginia, Florida, Illinois, and Oregon.

The Tapper Research and Testing Center is dedicated as the first public space in which researchers, students, and educators can conduct independent research in the Visual History Archive.

Broken Silence, a series of five documentaries representing the Holocaust as experienced by survivors from Argentina and Uruguay, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Russia, is completed for broadcast to global audiences.

1999

The goal of collecting 50,000 testimonies for the Visual History Archive is reached.

The Shoah Foundation installs its first digital access system, a one-terabyte cache, at the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

The Shoah Foundation unveils its first foreign-language educational product, the German-language CD-ROM Erinnern fur Gegenwart und Zukunft (Remembering for the Present and the Future).

1998

The 40,000th testimony is recorded.

The 1,500th testimony indexed.

The Last Days feature documentary premieres in New York and Los Angeles and subsequently earns the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1999.

The Shoah Foundation releases its first English-language educational product based on testimonies: a CD-ROM entitled Survivors: Testimonies of the Holocaust.

1997

The 25,000th testimony is recorded.

Pioneering database storage and networking techniques are tested.

The Lost Children of Berlin documentary premieres on A&E and is honored with the Edward R. Murrow Award.

1996

The 10,000th testimony is recorded.

Prototype digital preservation and indexing systems are tested.

The Institute’s Survivors of the Holocaust documentary airs on TBS and subsequently earns multiple awards, including two Emmys, a Peabody, and a CableACE.

1995

Regional offices open worldwide.

Digital video preservation and indexing software development begin.

An international network of coordinators, interviewers, videographers, and volunteers is trained to schedule and conduct interviews around the world.

The first multinational interviewer training session is held in Amsterdam.

1994

Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation is established in Los Angeles. Its mission is to videotape, before it is too late, the first-person accounts of 50,000 Holocaust survivors and other witnesses.

Interviewer training begins.

Regional offices open in New York and Toronto.

The first Holocaust survivor testimony is videotaped.

1993

Steven Spielberg begins and completes principal photography on Schindler’s List in Krakow, Poland.