| ABOUT THE VISUAL HISTORY ARCHIVE
The Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive (VHA) is a web-based tool that allows users to search over 30,000 experiential and geographic indexing terms to find relevant video in the Shoah Foundation archive. The VHA also allows searching of extracts from the Pre-Interview Questionnaires and by names of all people - interviewees as well as names they reference.
This tool permits researchers to identify both whole testimonies of relevance as well as specific segments within the testimony that relate to their area of interest. At this time, the VHA is available at the Shoah Foundation's Tapper Research and Testing Center, and at select universities in the United States via an Internet2 connection. Yale University Library has been providing VHA access to students and faculty as well as researchers from Yale and beyond since the Fall of 2003.
The Shoah Foundation Archives Collaborative Project
Yale University Library is participating in a Mellon Foundation Grant-funded pilot project with the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, Rice University, University of Michigan and the University of Southern California. The program is intended to make the Shoah Foundation's digital video archive of Holocaust testimonies available on campus via a special academic network known as Internet2. This is a pilot project and the resource is still under development. First-time users of the interface are strongly encouraged to start in the Cowles Reference Center in Manuscripts and Archives (SML 150) where staff can respond to any questions or problems.
A comprehensive final report on the project at Yale was produced in June of 2004 with an addendum in June of 2005. The following are links to Adobe Acrobat Reader versions of these reports. You may download a free Acrobat document reader at www.acrobat.com.
Please note that due to the nature of Yale's agreement with the Shoah Foundation, some information on this site is only accessible from within Yale's network.
Other Resources
The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies is a collection of over 4,200 videotaped interviews with witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust. This archive has been at Sterling Memorial Library for more than 20 years. These video testimonies may only be viewed by appointment in the reading room of Manuscripts and Archives.
Catalog records for the Fortunoff collection are available online through the library's ORBIS catalog. To limit searches to the archive, simply include, "AND HVT" with the search terms in a keyword search. Please contact the archive at (203) 432-1879 or email fortunoff.archive@yale.edu.
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