“Cloud Archives” at the University of Southern California: The USC Shoah Foundation and the USC Digital Repository.

Friday, October 26, 2012 at 4:00pm
The Loew Auditorium - Black Family Visual Arts Center
Sam Gustman
CTO Shoah Foundation
Associate Dean, University of Southern California Libraries
Co-sponsored by ISTS, the Department of Film and Media Studies, and the Dartmouth College Library.

Sam Gustman

Abstract

The mission of USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education is to overcome prejudice, intolerance, and bigotry through the educational use of the Institute's visual history testimonies. The Institute is the custodian of the Visual History Archive, a collection of 51,696 audiovisual testimonies from Holocaust survivors and other witnesses. The Institute ensures that their stories become part of a living legacy with continued value and relevance for each generation by providing access to the testimonies through digital portals, global education programs, interdisciplinary research and scholarship initiatives.

The technology that supports this work includes one of the fastest super computers in the world to help manage the four Petabyte database of testimonies. Magnetic media, like video tape, has a limited life span. Life expectancy for video tape stock is roughly 20 years before age based damage occurs. With the guidance of a team of historians, technology professionals, software engineers and information management experts, the Institute developed a system to digitize videotaped interviews and then maintain them in perpetuity in a format that is indexed and searchable by topic using key words and phrases. This process not only preserves testimonies for all time, it enhances their scholarly value by making them accessible and easy to use in educational settings.

The systems and processes used by the USC Shoah Foundation are now used by the USC Digital Repository to provide cloud services to collections from around the world. The USC Digital Repository expertly digitizes recordings on film, video, or audiotapes for collections of scholarly interest. Researchers, small archives, large archives and commercial archives can use the Cloud Archiving facilities of the USC Digital Repository to digitize, catalog, preserve and provide access to collections of any size. The USC Digital Repository is a part of the USC Libraries.

• The USC Digital Repository can convert many common and unique types of physical and digital source material, ranging from paper documents and photographs to disk drives and video, into a broad range of industry-standard digital formats consistently and accurately.
• Repository staff are especially experienced with audio and videotapes, but we can digitize most types of audio-visual materials, books and collections on paper.
• Expert archival staff works with USC students to help encode your source materials, collect metadata, and catalog your content.
• Current collections outside of USC include testimonies from the Albanian Human Rights collection, video content from the Africana department at Brown University and show content from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.

Bio

Sam Gustman has been chief technology officer (CTO) of the Shoah Foundation since 1994 and was responsible for overseeing the 2006 move of the foundation's archives from Universal Studios to the USC. Gustman is also associate dean at the USC Libraries, where he holds a faculty appointment.

As CTO of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, Gustman provides technical leadership for the integration of the institute's digital archives into USC's collection of electronic resources, ensuring the archive's accessibility for academic and research communities at USC and around the world. He is responsible for the operations, preservation, and cataloging of the institute's 8-petabyte digital library, one of the largest public video databases in the world. His office offers technical support for universities and organizations that subscribe to the institute's visual history archives. His office also provides website support and duplication services for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, which is part of the USC College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences.

As associate dean of the USC Libraries, Gustman is responsible for the technology used in the 23 Libraries at USC. He also leads the USC Digital Repository, responsible for providing services to the USC community and to organization around the world to manage their archives.

Gustman has twenty years of leadership experience in information technology. In addition to his responsibilities for the USC Shoah Foundation Institute, he has developed proposals for new antipiracy technologies at USC. He has been the primary investigator on National Science Foundation research projects with a cumulative funding total of more than $8 million. He has a bachelor of science in engineering, with a focus in computer engineering, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Slides

Sam Gustman's slides