students
Institute at a Glance
The USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education, with an archive of nearly 52,000 videotaped testimonies from Holocaust survivors and other witnesses, is part of the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences at the University of Southern California. The USC Shoah Foundation Institute works with a global network of partners to provide an array of valuable educational services that reach educators, students, and the general public around the world.

Among the work the Institute undertakes is:
  • Digital access to the entire archive
  • Visual history in the classroom – higher education
  • Visual history in the classroom – secondary education
  • Visual history training
  • Visual history collections
  • Documentaries

  • Digital access to the Institute’s archive is possible via connection to Internet2, or its variants in other countries, to universities in the U.S. and abroad, allowing students, faculty, and the community to use testimonies in classroom settings and for research purposes. Internet2 is a high-capacity network capable of more effective data transmission than the Internet. In addition to the University of Southern California, the archive is available at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Rice University, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Duke University, North Carolina State University, Florida Atlantic University, University of Minnesota, University of California, San Diego, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, Freie Universität Berlin, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The Institute will continue expanding access to other universities and institutions in 2007.


    Integration of testimonies from the archive in University courses, seminars, and research
  • 50 courses taught using the archive

  • Testimony-based classroom activity, including products, lessons, activities, and screenings.
  • Reaching more than 78,000 schools and more than 2 million students worldwide

  • 19 educational resources on DVD, VHS, or on the Institute’s website

  • Designed to guide educators through various ways in which visual history testimony can be incorporated into lessons and classroom activities.
  • 114 teacher trainings conducted for educators in 13 countries

  • Collections of testimonies from the archive, accessible for research, educational purposes, and general use at libraries, museums, universities, and other institutions worldwide. Collections include some, or all of the testimonies collected by the Institute in a specific city, country, or language.
  • 83 collections established in institutions in 22 countries,
    including collections in 23 U.S. States

  • Feature-length films that draw almost exclusively from the
    Shoah Foundation Institute’s Visual History Archive.
  • 11 films, broadcast in 50 countries and subtitled in 28 languages