Collecting, indexing and digitizing survivor accounts: Holocaust testimonies in the digital age

This chapter deals with audiovisual Holocaust testimony in the digital age. Of particular interest here are the media conditions that now determine the rationale of the collection and the dissemination of testimony. Survivors’ testimony can take the form of many different media: from written documents, to audio recordings and video testimonies. As the Holocaust Survivors Film Project was from the start occupied with recording the interviews, handing over the tapes to Yale University made it possible for the recordings to be accessible. The ease of use of video technology makes it ideally suited to recording interviews, though using video as a storage medium also has its difficulties. The video interviews of the Fortunoff Video Archive are also accessible from various places. The interviews that came into being through the assistance of local organizations are included in the collections of those institutions and are thus accessible there as well.