Rice University is one of three institutions to join the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation in a pilot project to explore the scholarly uses of the foundation’s digital video archive in its research and instructional programs beginning in fall 2003.

The Shoah Foundation archive contains approximately 117,000 hours of videotaped testimony from Holocaust survivors and witnesses—recorded in 32 languages from 56 countries. The project, which also includes the University of Southern California and Yale University, was made possible by a $1-million grant to the Shoah Foundation by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

One of the project’s aims is to help researchers at the three universities understand the opportunities and challenges of supporting faculty scholarship and teaching with electronic tools and digital libraries. In addition, the project offers the Shoah Foundation the opportunity to test the scalability and usefulness of its digital library.

The Shoah Foundation sought cooperative work with Rice because the university is known for pioneering a number of innovative uses of electronic resources for classroom and research use. Rice also has a long tradition of successful interdisciplinary programs, making it ideal for piloting innovative uses of the Shoah Foundation materials in a range of courses. The university plans to use the Shoah archives in a variety of ways, integrating it into the curriculum of courses as diverse as anthropology, linguistics, religion, German, art, and computer science.

The Shoah Foundation was established by filmmaker Steven Spielberg in 1994. Its mission is “to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry—and the suffering they cause—through the educational use of the foundation’s visual history testimonies.”

—Margot Dimond