---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Memory Fellows <AMFELLOWS@RS8.LOC.GOV>
Poster: Marta Brooks <marta@BIGSKY.NET>
Subject: Re: A digital library to anticipate
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Thanks Frances. This is very interesting information. I'm working with
the Mansfield Center on East Asian Studies and they are encountering
similar concerns regarding the privacy of voices of war-stories told by
Koreans, Japanese, Chinese, Hmong, etc. All that you mention is very
pertinent-I passed this on to my other team members. Thank you, MartaAt
11:00 AM 9/29/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi all -
>
>I want to report on a talk I went to a couple of nights ago given by Sam
>Gustman, Executive Director of Technology of the Survivors of the Shoah
>Visual History Foundation. This project was founded by Steven Spielberg
>after the completion of Shindler's List. Over 50,000 Holocaust survivors
>have been interviewed on videotape, producing a archive of more than
>100,000 hours of digitized testimony plus pictures and other artifacts
>provided by the interviewees. Gustman was here to visit with folks at the
>National Center for Supercomputing Applications, seeking help in the
>management of such an enormous database (terabytes and terabytes...). Part
>of its size has to do with the extensive indexing. They've had catalogers
>indexing "phrases" of data -- amounting to an average of every three
>minutes of tape time. The searching capability should be incredible.
>
>Many things came out during his talk and the subsequent question session --
>my brain is still trying to digest it all. For example, the Foundation
>will never make the archive available in an unlimited way over a medium
>like the Internet because of security issues. They are *very* concerned
>with uses and abuses of the survivors' testimonies. Instead, they want as
>wide a distribution as possible under more controlled conditions. So right
>now they are working with five repositories (e.g., the Simon Wiesenthal
>Center in L.A., the Holocaust Museum, etc.), producing derivative products
>(videos, CD-ROMs), and investigating Internet 2 and authenticating
>procedures. Reaching schools is a high priority for them. Gustman
>mentioned the name of a writing project I wasn't familiar with, from which
>they'll draw teachers for focus groups. Another question came up about
>"cataloger trauma" -- how the catalogers are dealing with spending day
>after day indexing this difficult material. I'm barely touching on things
>here, but you can imagine the variety of issues that were discussed.
>
>The audience represented an eclectic variety of interests -- the digital
>library folks (from our library school and the University Library),
>anthropology and ethnography types, students, and lots of people from the
>Jewish community. The Foundation may take on other similar projects in the
>future, such as interviewing people about the Civil Rights era, etc.
>
>More information is available at the Foundation web site: http://www.vhf.org/
>
>Cheers, Frances
>
>Frances F. Jacobson
>francey@uiuc.edu
>University Laboratory High School Librarian jacobson@uni.uiuc.edu
>
>1212 W. Springfield Avenue
>Urbana, IL 61801
>217-333-1589 http://www.uni.uiuc.edu/library
>
>
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