New Partnership: USC Shoah Foundation and Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University to Provide Access to Each Other’s Collections

From a Joint Announcement:

Thanks to a new partnership between the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the Fortunoff Video Archive at Yale University, researchers at both institutions can now access each other’s extensive Holocaust archives.
Under the agreement, Yale University is now one of 95 access sites worldwide where the USCShoah Foundation Visual History Archive is available. Yale University is the only institution in Connecticut where the interviews of the USC Shoah Foundation’s Archive are accessible in their entirety.
And USC becomes the first location on the West Coast to join 24 other institutions, including universities, museums and research institutes, to offer access to the Fortunoff Video Archive, a collection within the Manuscripts and Archives Department of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University. It holds more than 4,400 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors, witnesses, and bystanders. Collection of the testimonies began in 1979. In addition to interviews conducted at Yale, 37 affiliate projects produced survivor testimonies for the Archive, working in over a dozen countries. The Archive includes interviews in 21 languages.
The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive is a collection of over 55,000 video testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides, including the Armenian, Rwandan, Guatemalan, Cambodian genocides and the Nanjing Massacres in China. Collection of the 54,000 Holocaust interviews began in 1994. The Archive includes interviews conducted in 64 countries and 42 languages.
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Stephen Naron, Director of the Fortunoff Video Archive, said the partnership will enhance scholarship.
“My hope is that this is a first step towards further cooperation to enhance testimony discovery and access across collections,” he said. “There are thousands of testimonies at dozens of institutions worldwide, but until now little work has been done to enable searches across collections – this complicates the location of testimonies by survivors’ relatives and scholars alike. Exchanging collection access allows the Fortunoff Archive and USC Shoah Foundation to improve our ability to assist the students, scholars and families that rely on us to make these important collections available.”
In addition to providing full access to each other’s archives, the USC Shoah Foundation Center for Advanced Genocide Research and the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University are collaborating to develop cooperative projects that will encourage scholars to use the resources of both archives to advance academic research on the Holocaust and other genocides as well as integrate these testimonies into their university teaching.

Read the Complete Announcement

Filed under: Archives and Special Collections, Interviews, Libraries, News