Historic audio and video footage is undergoing cataloging and indexing as it gets closer to being fully integrated into the Visual History Archive. J. Michael Hagopian’s collection of 400 interviews of Armenian Genocide survivors and witnesses was handed over to the USC Shoah Foundation from the Armenian Film Foundation in an effort to preserve and integrate the collection. This interesting information came from Monrovia Weekly in their article, “Armenian Film Foundation Delivers 400 Digitized Testimonies to USC Shoah Foundation.”

The interviews were transferred from the original 16mm film to preservation-quality digital files (motion JPEG 2000) and now, USC Shoah Foundation technology staff will create broadcast-quality and internet-quality versions of each interview and begin integrating and indexing each interview into the Visual History Archive.

At the core of USC Shoah Foundation’s indexing system is a one-of-a-kind thesaurus. The thesaurus includes 60,000 terms that describe genocide-related concepts and experiences.

Melody K. Smith

Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.