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Shoah Foundation – Over 800 New Indexing Terms to be Added to Visual History Archive Thesaurus

A team of USC Shoah Foundation researchers has identified over 800 new indexing terms that will be added to the Visual History Archive when it undergoes its next big update in the coming weeks. The new terms were generated from approximately 1,250 testimonies from the Institute’s new Holocaust Canadian Collections, the final 88 testimonies from the Armenian Genocide Collection, 25 additional testimonies of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, and the first 10 Guatemalan Genocide testimonies, which will all be added to the Visual History Archive with the next update. Over the past year, a team of indexers has watched each new testimony and used the Institute’s indexing software to assign indexing terms to each minute of the testimony. These terms include names of people, places, historical events, emotions, organizations, and general experiences, such as “hunger” or “hiding.” The Institute’s current thesaurus contains over 63,000 terms, which visitors to the Visual History Archive use to search through the archive’s 53,000 testimonies. Whenever the indexers came across a segment that they felt they could not index with the current choice of terms in the thesaurus, they sent it to Crispin Brooks, curator of the Visual History Archive. Brooks would then work with a smaller group of indexers who are experts in particular subject areas or geographies to research each proposed term and help determine whether it should be added to the thesaurus…”

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