I believe that by now, there has been general agreement in the scholarly community, although not universally, about the importance of oral testimonies, whether dealing with the Holocaust or any other subject. It is incumbent upon us to use every bit of evidence in the study and analysis of any historical subject, and to seek out those resources which are less obvious, not yet discovered or recorded, or not yet examined. Focusing on the Holocaust, although it is more than fifty-five years since the end of the World War II, there is still much that is yet unexamined or missing, and much that still needs to be scrutinized. With the opening of the archives in the former Soviet Union, about which I know a great deal more now thanks to Laura Engelstein's talk this morning, scholars have available new sources of information. There are still myriad documents, diaries, letters, photographs, and other records which are coming to light all over the world, and some that will never surface. Last night David Stam analogized the study of history to a polar iceberg. My analogy the compilation of a giant jigsaw puzzle that does not have the image of the finished product on the outside of the box, and furthermore, we know in advance that many of pieces are missing and may never be found. While it is a daunting challenge, we would be remiss if we did not try to solve the puzzle, knowing full well there is not one definitive solution, and that we may find many partial solutions, or not find solutions in our lifetimes, but also hoping that future generations of puzzle solvers will continue our work and reveal more and more of the finished picture, and finally have enough so that the missing pieces can be roughly sketched in, in many variants, but all based on informed, intelligent analysis.

       We do have many pieces of this complex puzzle and it would behoove us to ignore any of them. Yehuda Bauer, one of the deans of Holocaust historians, in his most recent book Rethinking the Holocaust, states " Above all, we need the witness. There is no Holocaust history without witnesses. Direct testimony of the survivors and the authentic surviving descriptions (diaries, letters) by Jews who did not survive themselves…" ¹

       The notion that recording testimonies is only a recent activity, is not entirely accurate. In the immediate postwar period, David P. Boder, a psychologist who had immigrated to the United States from eastern Europe, interviewed 109 victims, mostly in displaced persons camps in France, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany. Published in 1949 by the University of Illinois Press, his book, I Did Not Interview the Dead, contained translated and edited accounts of eight of those whose testimonies he had recorded on one of the earliest audio, wire-to-wire recorders.² Between 1947 and 1957, grants from the United States National Health Service enabled him to translate seventy of the interviews. Mimeographed copies were deposited in several research libraries, and today this data is available in microform at several research libraries, including Yale. However, Boder was never able to obtain additional funding to complete his work or further publish.³ He died in 1961. The original recordings and transcripts are available in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress. Boder's personal papers are available in the Department of Special Collections at the University of California at Los Angeles. An edited volume of thirty-six of Boder's interviews, edited by Donald L. Niewyk, was published in 1998. However, the editor states that "The interviews required such extensive editing… " and "that retranslation into more idiomatic English is so extensive that no effort has been made to identify the passages that deviate from Boders' early transcripts."⁴ This "Note" emphasizes the importance of examining the original material, rather than an editor's version of it. The transcripts and some analysis are also available on a website mounted by the Illinois Institute of Technology.

       At the present time, the Fortunoff Video Archive collection comprises over 4,300 video taped testimonies, at least 10,000 hours, which were recorded beginning in 1979 and continue to the present time. They are in more than twenty languages, recorded by thirty-seven affiliate projects in North and South America, Europe, and Israel. In your handout, our website address is at the top and this will provide additional information about the Fortunoff video Archive. Since the Archive opened to the public in 1982, hundreds of visitors have viewed testimonies. The results have been more varied in scope and genre than anyone might have imagined when the first testimonies were recorded. They include many books and articles in a variety of disciplines including history, psychology, psychiatry, literature, art, political science, sociology, education, law, philosophy, and medicine as well as projects that fall into the realm of the more creative. "Different Trains" by Steve Reich, a Grammy winning, classical music composition/recording included sound bites of survivors. Artists, actors, directors, have viewed testimonies to assist them in their creative work, and of course professional documentarians, as well as educators and high school students who have used testimony excerpts for inclusion in their programs. We have worked with courts in the United States and the United Kingdom to assist them in locating potential witnesses for important trials. We are presently working with two museums in Germany to supply testimonies for exhibit purposes.

       The testimonies provide only a small number of pieces of the puzzle we are trying to construct, and occasional pieces can be flawed. Having spent some time viewing and listening to survivor testimonies, the historian Christopher Browning reminds us:

It is no offense to survivor memory to accept their fallibility as witnesses; they often openly admit to failing memory themselves. And it is no act of disrespect to subject survivor testimony to the same critical analysis that we would the conflicting and fallible testimony of other historical witnesses, even as we recognize that the survivors have lived through events that we cannot even remotely imagine on the basis of our own personal experiences.⁵

       Browning used the testimonies of 134 survivors of the Starachowice labor camp. He notes these "…testimonies (about one camp) makes clear the contradictions among survivor accounts, [but] it also reveals a firm core of shared memory."⁶ He also concluded that, "Survivor memories proved to be more stable and less malleable than I had anticipated."⁷

       Recognizing the importance of witness accounts to research points to the necessity of providing both physical and intellectual access to them. As discussed this morning, the most essential aspect of physical access is preservation. Whether the resources are paper, magnetic tape, computer disks or tapes, or any other media or format, without careful and professional preservation programs, they will be lost. The Boder tapes were not available for many years due to lack of physical access. Thanks to the Library of Congress, preservation work was completed in 1995 and research copies are available for use there. Now the transcripts and some summary and analysis are also available on a website at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Although an initial challenge is collecting the testimonies, it is for naught if the keepers of these precious resources have not implemented professional and on-going preservation programs.

       When I came to the Fortunoff Archive in 1984, it was one of very few electronic collections in the Yale Library system. The collection's beginnings were due to the development of videotape technology and the initial decision was to use a professional format (U-Matic) that was the industry standard in 1979. The machine population was enormous then. However, this industry is driven by consumer and production dollars. The formula was that while U-Matic was the industry standard for about twenty years, the next format (Betacam) would last half as long, and the next half again. The very technology which made the collection possible, could also mark the end of its existence due to format obsolescence. We began planning for migration of our U-Matic testimonies in the early 1990's. In a recent discussion with Meg Bellinger, Yale's Associate University Librarian for Intregrated Library Systems and Technical Services, she noted that preservation of non-electronic materials has had many years of almost semi-permanent funding from outside agencies resulting in increased budgets and staffs but that there has not been a corresponding growth in funding for electronic resources. This is the dilemma we faced . We raised a preservation fund of over a half million dollars from private donors to support tape preservation and migration. At that time, analog was the only option and between 1997 and 2001, 2,841 cassettes were professionally restored and reformatted to two copies each on Betacam SP. After all of our preservation funds had been expended, we turned to the Preservation and Access Division of the National Endowment for the Humanities. We applied for a grant in 2001 and were notified in 2002 that we had received the funding, which does require matching funds. In the interim between application and notification, we learned of a developing video preservation technology that might allow us to restore and reformat more than twice as many testimonies for the same dollars. After many meetings with Yale staff and the vendor and several conversations with the NEH program officer, we reached the decision to become a beta test site for the new technology, System for Automated Migration of Media Archives, entitled SAMMA. This system utilizes robotics and automation to clean, reformat, and digitize videotapes at the same time it records metadata about the condition of the original tapes using precise measurements. We have been working on aspects of this process for over two years, but the actual cleaning and reformatting began only a month ago (and yes, we have already received two, one-year no-cost extensions from the NEH).

       When we applied for the grant, digitization was not even an option because there was no acceptable digital format for video. Digital video is almost always an access, not a preservation format. All digital video formats were lossy and compressed and there was not an industry standard. Uncompressed video takes enormous amounts of storage space, and each compressed format uses different algorithms for compression. Ones and zeros are all the same, but obsolescence - both software and hardware - is guaranteed and each time the format is migrated, there is the risk of loss and also of visual artifacts. There is a fairly new format, Motion JPEG 2000 with lossless compression. At the present time, encoding for real time conversion is close to final development and without it, it takes eight hours for one hour of video.. However, the amount of storage space required is enormous. All of the testimonies going through SAMMA will be encoded to MPEG2, an access format. 250 hours will be encoded to MJPEG2000 which will require 10 terabytes of storage. We have reached an agreement with the Persistent Archives Testbed of the San Diego Supercomputing Center for storage and will move the files through Internet2. The effective cost is $20,000 for the storage array being planned, in which data management is independent of storage systems; probably some data will be on tape, and some on grid-bricks. While formidable now, storage costs are coming down dramatically. We will not discard any of our original masters - resulting in even more versions of each testimony, and holding multiple versions of a work in disparate locations is a fundamental principle of preservation of electronic materials.

       We could spend all day, perhaps all week, or all month discussing issues of digitization. In your handout, the second url listed is a Library of Congress website that provides a great deal of information about digital Text, Sound, Still Images and Moving Images. The handout also includes lists of digital formats for each which will provide a sense of the complexity - or perhaps even confusion. Libraries have been grappling with these issues for many years. Both Jonathan Spence and David Stam have already mentioned many of them.

       What should be preserved? Obviously not everything. What do we do about born digital texts, sound, still, and moving images? Is there value in the artifact itself - and this calls to mind Jonathan Spence's description of papers folded like concertinas and the connotations of the actual paper and folds. How do we deal with authentification, provenance, possible manipulation, migration, software and hardware obsolescence? How much storage space - both physical and electronic - is required and at what cost?

       In the Yale Library system now, there are so many collections that contain electronic materials that I cannot accurately quantify the number of staff working with them. There are four staff devoted to Electronic Collections in Sterling Library alone. There is a Digital Library and Research Planning Team of seven. The Video Archive is a program of the department of Manuscripts of Archives and I believe every member of the staff is dealing with electronic materials in one way or another, outside of cataloging. The map collection has a relatively new staff member who is a GIS specialist and this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

       I had previously mentioned the importance of not only physical access, but intellectual access to electronic materials. These must be cataloged and the catalog records should be universally accessible, preferably, online. Scholars can attest to the importance of readily available, well-organized catalogs and finding aids conforming to established archival practices and employing authoritative and standard vocabulary, without which their research would be much more difficult, or even impossible. Imagine how much more so when dealing with non-paper materials which cannot even be "skimmed." The established practices of the library and archival professionals are designed to aid research, and researchers who go from institution to institution can attest to the importance of conforming to these practices.

        The cataloging must also be done by those who have subject area expertise so that the initial analysis identifies applicable headings. We have included the bibliographic records for our testimonies in Yale's online public access catalog which includes all materials held in the Yale library system. Particularly for Yale students and scholars, we believe it is essential for them to learn of monographs and other archival materials, not just video testimonies, although there are easy search mechanisms for searching only our testimonies. There are search strategies that can identify testimonies by geographic headings or subject headings or a combination of both using Boolean operatives (and, not, or). Advanced searches can narrow fields effectively and we offer assistance in developing these. There is a tutorial on our website as well (www.library.yale.edu/testimonies). The testimony records are also entered into Eudora, the international bibliographic utility of the Research Libraries Network, so that scholars and researchers unaware of the testimonies will be alerted to them. In addition to the catalog, which is accessible online from your own desk at home, we provide a finding aid at the Archive which is time coded to match a visible time code on the video testimony. These allow a researcher to fast-forward the testimony only to those portions that pertain to his or her interest. We are in the process of automating the finding aids. We plan to bundle the MPEG2 video files with the electronic finding aids into a multi-media framework, but this is a discussion for another paper.

        The jigsaw puzzles of history, of which the Holocaust is only one of very many, will continue to intrigue us, our children, and our children's children, and we will all keep working on it. The pieces in the Video Archive are described by Yehuda Bauer in Rethinking the Holocaust: "…testimonies are one of the most important sources of our knowledge of the Holocaust because the Germans tried to murder the murder - prevent Jewish documentation " " Testimonies are " …'documents' walking among us on two legs."8 The Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert wrote, "I turn to history not for lessons in hope, but to confront my experience with the experience of others and to win for myself something which I should call universal compassion - a sense of responsibility for the human conscience." Preserving these resources, these puzzle pieces, for future generations, and carefully cataloging them to facilitate their use is our continuing challenge, and one that will require ever increasing resources. I invite you to assist those of us in the library community to try to answer some of the questions raised yesterday and today, to frame additional questions, and to lobby for appropriate new technologies and for the resources to support this vital work.

1. Bauer, Yehuda, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 2001), p. 23.

2. Boder, David P. I Did Not Interview the Dead (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1949), p. xi.

3. Niewyk, Donald L., ed., " A Note on Editorial Methods," Fresh Wounds: Early Narratives of Holocaust Survival (Chapel Hill; London : University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

4. Ibid, p.

5. Browning, Christopher R., Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killer (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 91.

6. Ibid, p. 91.

7. Ibid, p. 92.

8. Bauer, p. 24.

Joanne Weiner Rudof, Archivist

Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies

Yale University

New Haven, CT

March 24, 2005

Since 1990, Joanne Rudof has been Archivist of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. From 1984 - 1990, she served as Project Manager of the Archive, and before that she taught in synagogue schools and held several volunteer positions dealing with the Holocaust and Holocaust education on the local, state, and national levels. She earned her B.S. at Temple University and her M.A. at Wesleyan University, with a concentration on Modern European History.

Joanne Rudof has been an important player in the global effort to document Holocaust archives. To her credit are numerous articles and other documents, video programming activities, and award winning broadcasts. At Yale University, she is known as organizer and presenter at a number of significant conferences related to the Holocaust, Genocide Studies, and education and documentation about these topics. These events have attracted audiences from numerous parts of the world. She has served in professional capacities for the NEH and the Association of Moving Image Archivists, among others, and has consulted for a number of organizations in her area of expertise. Currently, Joanne Rudof is engaged in a project aimed at preservation of Holocaust video testimonies.