USC Shoah Foundation - The Institute for Visual History and Education has announced a landmark partnership with ProQuest, a technology company that empowers researchers at universities, libraries, schools and knowledge-driven organisations around the world. Starting immediately, ProQuest will become the exclusive distributor of USC Shoah Foundation's Visual History Archive to colleges and universities around the world (except China).
Access to the Visual History Archive through ProQuest will no longer require a high-speed Internet connection; access will be available via the standard Internet creating a contemporary streaming experience. The two organisations are currently creating a new interface that will be launched in 2017. In the meantime, the current interface will be used for the 2016-2017 school year that will enable the Visual History Archive's rich, compelling content to be cross-searched with other ProQuest resources, increasing its discoverability and usage with college and university students and researchers around the world.
The ProQuest agreement is the first of several key announcements the Institute is expected to make in 2016 connected to its Visual History Archive Program that it announced last month. The Visual History Archive Program is a five-year initiative to reimagine how its four main audiences connect to testimonies – colleges and universities, secondary education, communities and organisations. The program is made possible in part through a transformative donation from Lee Liberman, a member of the Institute's Board of Councilors Executive Committee.
The partnership with ProQuest is also allowing for archival-quality transcripts of all 53,000 testimonies. This massive endeavour will complement the Institute's indexing methods and further refine the process of searching testimonies for specific points of interest.
Until now it has been prohibitive for the Institute to transcribe its testimonies owing to the scale of the Visual History Archive (the full Archive represents over 112,000 hours of testimony). The ProQuest partnership is enabling the Institute to transcribe the interviews.
Revenue from the partnership will be used to offset the cost of transcripts. The transcription process is expected to take five years and will be undertaken by native-speaking academic research transcriptionists for the 39 languages represented in the Visual History Archive.
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