Chief Technology Officer Sam Gustman To Speak about Cloud Archives at University of Michigan

USC Shoah Foundation chief technology officer Sam Gustman will return to his alma mater, the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to give a presentation about the Visual History Archive and the USC Digital Repository on Thursday.

The talk, titled “USC Shoah Foundation and Cloud Archives,” is hosted by the University of Michigan School of Information at 2 p.m. in the Ehrlicher Room, 3100 North Quad. It is free and open to the public.

Gustman will describe the technology and processes behind efforts to archive and digitize testimony of genocide survivors and witnesses around the world in the USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive. Gustman oversaw the archive’s move from Universal Studios to USC in 2006 and is responsible for global deployment of the USC Shoah Foundation online digital literacy systems to secondary education schools.  He is also responsible for the operations, preservation, and cataloging of the institute's 8-petabyte digital library.

Gustman will also speak about the USC Digital Repository (he is its executive director), which relies on infrastructure and technology similar to the Visual History Archive to archive and preserve other video collections in a “cloud archive” system supported by USC’s Center for High-Performance Computing. It is the first repository in the country with the capability of digitizing, storing and preserving audiovisual assets for commercial and educational users. Clients include the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Maker Studios and public broadcasting stations.