The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies is a project partner in the Yale Media Management Environment. The project will leverage Yale’s digital media infrastructure to develop an access-controlled repository of digital video testimonies and an online environment that meets the needs of researchers and stewards of the archive. Over 10,000 hours of testimony will be searchable through indexed testimonial summaries and viewable through side-by-side display of summaries and related videos. These new capabilities provide unprecedented access, synthesis, and analytical opportunities to the research community.

The Media Management Environment implementation provides access to a corpus of materials that are undergoing a much larger preservation effort. The Fortunoff staff is engaged in a three-year program, started in 2011, to digitize over 10,000 hours of witness testimony recorded on a variety of analog videotape formats between 1979 and 2009. The archive anticipates that 12,241 master cassettes will be inspected, cleaned, repaired if necessary, then migrated to multiple digital video formats for both preservation and access purposes. Digital migration and preservation, of this irreplaceable resource, was chosen as the best approach presently available to safeguard this unique collection due to the original media’s format obsolescence.

Work to develop the side-by-side viewer will start on the project in the fall of 2011 and is slated for completion in winter 2012.