Method - indexing
The USC Shoah Foundation. The Institute for Visual History and Education developed a sophisticated cataloguing and indexing system based on index-terms and categories. Remarkable about the index-system is the possibility to search not only for specific interviews but also within an interview it-self.
Cataloguing
The cataloguing department of the USC Shoah Foundation has catalogued and indexed each individual interview. Each videotape has been digitized and copied several times and biographical data of the interviewee based on the pre-interview questionnaire was attached. The cataloguing now enables the user to search for biographical information like names, places of birth, background of persecution etc.
Indexing
At the core of the indexing system is a thesaurus consisting of approximately 60,000 index-terms. Indexing was done by staff members that had watched each interview from beginning to the end and manually addedIndex-terms. Index-terms may be city names or other geographical terms (places, ghettos, camps) as well as descriptions of experiences during the Holocaust (i.e. “sense of time at the camps”). Videos have been divided in one-minute segments with the respective attached index-terms.
Search
The indexing system allows for a sophisticated search, not only for specific interviews but also within an interview. Access is possible by different criteria and categories. Thereby the USC Shoah Foundation has offered groundbreaking functions. Academic use of audiovisual material is still a new field. The expansive amount of interviews in combination with that many index-terms offers new perspectives in research and education.
Download guidelines of the USC Shoah Foundation: