Increases in Visual History Archive Access Sites, IWitness Users and More in Institute’s Latest Stats Update

Students watch testimony in Budapest, June 2016

USC Shoah Foundation’s latest quarterly stats update shows remarkable gains in its testimony access and academic and educational outreach over the past year.

From January 2016 to January 2017, the number of sites around the world that have full access to the Visual History Archive went from 53 to 75 – an unprecedented gain of 22 sites in a single year. The increase is due to the launch of USC Shoah Foundation’s partnership with ProQuest in March 2016, in which ProQuest became the exclusive distributor of the VHA to universities around the world.

Along with the increase in access sites over the past year came, naturally, an increase in the number of courses that are being taught with the VHA. A cumulative total of 591 courses have been taught using the VHA at universities, with 140 at USC alone, as of January 2017 – up from 532 and 133, respectively, in January 2016. In addition, 19 more scholarly books and articles that refer to the VHA were published in 2016.

More students and teachers are registering on IWitness than ever before. From January 2016 to January 2017, the number of IWitness registered educators jumped from 10,792 to 14,644. Registered students on IWitness increased from 42,928 to 68,056. IWitness also saw its first registrations ever from teachers in Afghanistan and Latvia.

USC Shoah Foundation also greatly expanded its reach on social media. In 2016, USC Shoah Foundation gained over 1,800 Facebook friends, 1,900 Twitter followers, 2,000 YouTube subscribers and 855 Instagram followers. Viewers watched 16,000 hours of testimony on the Institute’s YouTube channel in 2016.

As for the Visual History Archive itself, 2016 saw the addition of 1,000 testimonies to the archive. These include testimonies from the Armenian Genocide Collection, Guatemalan Genocide Collection, and collections from institutions throughout Canada as part of the Preserving the Legacy initiative.