The USC Shoah Foundation sponsors the Visual History Archive (VHA), a collection of almost 52,000 video interviews providing testimony to personal experiences of the Holocaust. The Shoah Foundation is also adding video interviews documenting genocides in Nanking, the Balkans and Rwanda.
We recommend that you create a personal username and password to login to the VHA after you connect via Criss Library's institutional account. This free registration establishes a personal account with which you can associate a collection of videos.
The mechanical aspects of searching the VHA are relatively simple and self-explanatory, but to search the database to full advantage, we advise that you at least browse through the User Manual.
The catalogers and editors of the VHA have created a Thesaurus of indexing terms which may prove helpful in identifying words and phrases to use for searching.
You may also find it helpful to examine or make a copy of the Survivor Pre-Interview Questionnaire. This document provides a roadmap to a typical interview, and it may serve to help you organize your notes and thoughts about what you see and hear.