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| You are here: 2000 / Workshops, Panels and Seminars / Workshops on Education / Workshop 4 on Education, "Use and Misuse of the Internet" / Presentation by Mrs. Karen Jungblut | |||||||||
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Participants Countries and organizations Conference documentation Conference programme 
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Report from Workshop 4 on Education: "Use and misuse of the Internet" Presentation by Mrs. Karen Jungblut Presentation by Asst. Director Mark Weitzman Presentation by Dr. Christopher Wolf Presentation by Mrs. Karen Jungblut Jungblut, Karen Presentation by Mrs. Karen Jungblut Introduction to Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation: Digital Cataloguing of Videotaped Testimonies There are a number of ways in which the Foundation will provide access to its material. This paper addresses the methodology by which the Foundations material will be available ?Online? Via secure fiber-optic networks. Background: After filming Schindler´s List in 1994, Steven Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, a non-profit organization. Its purpose is to videotape interviews with survivors and witnesses if the Holocaust and to create a digitized archive of catalogued testimonies that will be accessible to students and scholars, to teachers and educators, to documentary filmmakers and researchers. To create awareness about the Foundation among survivors and witnesses, outreach was conducted worldwide to encourage individuals who wished to give testimony to come forward and share their stories. The Foundation contacted local lay and religious leaders, institutions and individuals in many communities to seek guidance, support, and an understanding of the culture and issues unique to each country. Without the support and participation from these communities and local leaders, this project would not have been possible. By the end of 1998, more than 50,000 videotaped testimonies were gathered in 57 countries and in 32 languages. In addition to the Jewish survivor experience, the Foundation gathered testimonies from non-Jewish survivors and witnesses, including Sinti & Roma survivors, Jehovah´s Witnesses, rescuers, liberators and war crimes trial participants. Survivors and witnesses were asked to speak about prewar, wartime and postwar experiences. The collection consists of more than 114,000 hours of testimony. It would take more than 13 years to watch it in its entirety. The average testimony is approximately two and one-half hours long. The video testimonies are digitized into MPEG versions and the 180-terabytes are stored on a tape archive. Cataloguing: During the first years of its activities, the Foundation worked with historians, geographers, archivists, information technologists and other experts on developing a system to digitally catalogue the videotaped survivor and witness testimonies. Providing access to the information contained within the testimonies was fundamental to the vision of giving survivors and witnesses the opportunity to tell their stories. The goal is to provide usable access to the testimonies and enable the development of tools that will supplement and enhance Holocaust education. The cataloguing system was specifically designed to index the unique content of videotaped personal histories about the Holocaust. Cataloguing Methodology was developed in order to index oral history testimony with a great degree of specificity, depth and scope. In order to provide end users access to portions of testimonies relating to specific matters of interest, each testimony is divided into segments or small narrative units to which index terms can be assigned. Index terms are selected based upon the content as told by the interviewee. The Shoah Foundation Thesaurus from which Cataloguers draw the index terms currently consists of approximately 15,000 terms; more than 90 % of the terms are geographical terms; for example, small towns, cities, concentration camps, ghettos, refugee or DP camps. The remainder consists of experiential index terms like ”family life”, ”housing conditions in the ghettos” as well as historical events such as the ”November Pogrom (Nov 9-10, 1938)”. The Foundation´s historical team must approve each new index term for inclusion in this controlled vocabulary. Once a new term is inserted, it includes an authoritative source reference, a definition and a scope note that defines its usage. When terms cannot be verified in any authoritative source, the historical team recommends whether or not to incorporate the terms into the Thesaurus. If they are to be added but no accepted reference work documents them, the terms are added as unverified terms and are designated as such. In addition, the Cataloguers also store all the names of the people mentioned in the testimonies in a database. Before each interview, a Pre-Interview Questionnaire (PIQ) is completed by the interviewer with the interviewee. The interviewee´s biographical information, information about his or her prewar, wartime and postwar experience as well as names of family members is recorded in this document. If a person is mentioned during the interview who was not already noted in the PIQ, such as a family member, the Cataloguers enter the name into this database and can attach the name to each segment within the testimony in which the person is discussed. As mentioned earlier, the testimony is divided into segments which average three to six minutes in length. They are structured to have a logical beginning and end point. The break between segments occurs when the interviewee begins to describe a new experience. The Cataloguers use an interface developed by the Shoah Foundation which marks the timecodes of these segments. Besides segmenting and indexing, the Cataloguers also write an abstract for each segment that provides context for all the assigned index terms. These abstracts are important as hundreds of segments can potentially have two or more of the same index terms. Therefore, it is necessary to enable end users to distinguish between segments and to refine their searches. In addition, a one-page testimony summary is composed in order to provide context for the testimony as a whole. To maintain consistency, an indexed testimony goes through a two-tier review process. Cataloguers are assigned to teams led by Reviewers. These Reviewers verify that index terms are properly assigned and ensure that the abstracts properly reflect the assigned index terms. Historical Authority Supervisors oversee the Reviewers and the review process, as well as help to develop and maintain the Thesaurus. Once catalogued, the information within a testimony becomes searchable - the system enables the end user to arrive at specific points within a testimony by using index terms from the Shoah Foundation Thesaurus. The catalogued information is intended to serve as a navigational device that leads to the interviewees? own descriptions of their experiences within the testimony. In summary, when catalogued, a researcher will be able to locate specific segments in all the testimonies where interviewees describe a particular experience or he/she may choose to watch a specific testimony of interest in its entirety. Access locations to the Archive: Access to catalogued information and video testimony will only be granted through secure online networks - not the Internet. The first such network will be installed at the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. It is the first institution to provide digital accessibility to the Shoah Foundation Archive for public viewing. This high-speed network will make it possible to send high-quality video and other digital information to remote viewing sites in a secure manner. The next link to the Shoah Foundation?s Archive will be with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Direct links via secure fiber-optic lines between the Shoah Foundation and other institutions are in development. Yad Vashem and The Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, as well as a number of museums and organizations in Europe, will be the next institutions at which the Shoah Foundation Archive will be made available. The Shoah Foundation is committed to protecting the integrity of its material and ensuring that it be disseminated in an appropriate and secure manner. Because of these concerns, neither the entire Archive, nor individual testimonies, will be made available on the Internet. As long as security on the Internet remains unregulated and legally unenforced, the Foundation will find other means of distributing the content of its Archive within the United States and abroad. >> Back to top |
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Introduction Opening Session: Messages and speeches Plenary Sessions: Messages and speeches Workshops, Panels and Seminars
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| For information about this production and the Stockholm International Forum Conference Series please go to www.humanrights.gov.se or contact Information Rosenbad, SE-103 33 Stockholm, Sweden | |||||||||