Address: University of Southern California
Leavey Library
650 W. 35th St., Suite 114
Los Angeles, 90089
Phone: 213-740-6001
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Website: https://sfi.usc.edu/
Facebook: USC Shoah Foundation
Twitter: @uscshoahfdn
YouTube: youtube.com/USCShoahFoundation
Director/Person-in-Charge: Dr. Robert Williams, Executive Director
Year Established: 1994
Staff: 56
Type of Organization or Mission: USC Shoah Foundation-The Institute for Visual History and Education is dedicated to making audio-visual interviews with survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust and other genocides a compelling voice for education in action. The Institute's current collection of nearly 55,000 eyewitness testimonies contained within its Visual History Archive preserves history as told by the people who lived it, and lived through it. Housed at the University of Southern California, within the Dana and David Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences, the Institute works with partners around the world to advance scholarship and research, to provide resources and online tools for educators, and to disseminate the testimonies for educational purposes.
Services: The Institute supports the academic and scholarly use of the Visual History Archive at universities and memorial institutions, and other sites worldwide. Testimony from the Visual History Archive has been incorporated into nearly 494 university courses across a broad range of academic disciplines and enhanced over 146 research projects; The Visual History Archive available at in its entirety at 67 institutions around the world, and smaller collections are available at 220 sites in 36 countries. In March of 2016 USC Shoah Foundation announced a landmark partnership with ProQuest to quadruple that number within two years and projects a 10-fold increase by the Institute's 25th anniversary in 2019; The Visual History Archive is digitized, fully researchable, and hyper-linked to the minute. This indexing allows students, professors, researchers and others around the world to retrieve entire testimonies or search for specific sections within testimonies through a set of more than 63,000 key words and key phrases, 1.8 million names, and 695,000 images; The Institute provides educational resources, online tools, and training to help teachers use testimony in the classroom setting. IWitness, USC Shoah Foundation's flagship online educational platform, curates clips from over 2,224 full-length testimonies from the Visual History Archive to provide teachers with testimony-based multimedia learning programs.The Institute also works with governmental and non-governmental entities in countries where the testimonies originated to encourage their local educational use.
