USC Shoah Foundation staff came together last month for a weeklong discussion about how to update its intricate process of indexing each new testimony added to the Visual History Archive.

A team of USC Shoah Foundation researchers has identified over 800 new indexing terms that will be added to the Visual History Archive when it undergoes its next big update in the coming weeks.

As the Institute’s partner Fundacion de Antropologia Forense de Guatemala (FAFG) records testimonies of survivors of the genocide in Guatemala, it has begun sending the first few testimony videos back to USC Shoah Foundation in Los Angeles, where staff are beginning to index them – the first step toward their eventual integration into the Visual History Archive and IWitness.

“The Extermination of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire” will be used by scholars and and researchers currently indexing testimonies of Armenian Genocide survivors.

The latest, most significant update to the Visual History Archive’s indexing software since 2008 addresses the growing need for a way to index testimonies with more than one survivor.

The psychological focus of the testimonies in the Institute's new collection from Jewish Family and Children's Services (JFCS) of San Francisco meant that a new set of indexing terms had to be researched and developed.

With the arrival of new testimonies and indexers, USC Shoah Foundation is advancing to the next stage of its Preserving the Legacy initiative.

The initiative will use the Institute’s state-of-the-art infrastructure to digitize, index and integrate videotaped Holocaust testimony taken by other organizations around the world into the Visual History Archive.

USC Shoah Foundation’s research department will host seven new Holocaust indexers and three Aegis Trust Rwanda staff members this month for a training session on indexing Holocaust and Rwandan testimonies.

Testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the 1994 Rwandan Tutsi Genocide added to USC Shoah Foundation’s Visual History Archive have resulted in 500 new search terms for the archive’s indexing system.

The index is a controlled vocabulary of more than 50,000 terms that make up the Shoah Foundation’s Thesaurus and that allow detailed searching of the testimonies in the archive.