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December 3, 1999/24 Kislev 5760, Vol. 52, No.14
Spielberg to make Shoah testimony accessible
TOM TUGEND
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
LOS ANGELES - In a huge tent on the Universal Studios lot, crammed with advanced computer gear and large television screens, Steven Spielberg unveiled his high-tech master plan to transmit and preserve the living testimony of Holocaust survivors.
Hollywood's most successful filmmaker paused briefly last week to review the work of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which he founded five years ago in the wake of the worldwide impact of his film "Schindler's List." Up to now, 50,441 testimonies have been videotaped in 57 countries and 32 languages, he said. A total of 115,965 hours of testimony have been recorded, which would take one person 12 years and 10 months to view.
"This is like the original dream coming true," Spielberg said. "But like all dreams, you realize there's a lot more work ahead of you."
The biggest job will be to catalog, index and digitize most of the 116,000 hours of tapes to make them accessible and user-friendly to researchers and students. Names, places and events in each testimony must be cross-referenced so that users can call up any segment or topic with the aid of a 15,000-term glossary of keywords, ranging from a camp site, such as "Auschwitz," to more subtle references, such as "aid: assistance in hiding valuables."
The cataloging is labor-intensive, requiring eight to 12 hours to process a single hour of testimony. But without this state-of-the-art index, researchers looking for a specific piece of information would have to watch thousands of hours of testimony. The average interview runs 2 hours and 15 minutes, with the record length of 17 hours held by a survivor in Israel.
So far, interviews with 22,000 survivors have been indexed and digitized. By the time the remainder are processed, the Shoah Foundation will have the world's largest multimedia archive, with a database of 180 terabytes. By comparison, only 10 terabytes are needed to store the entire printed collection in the Library of Congress.
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