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Greenberg to present lecture on USC’s Holocaust digital library, largest in world, at Memorial Library, April 17
By Michael Worringer
Library Communications
MADISON, Wis.--A digital library collection of 52,000 video testimonies of Holocaust survivors and other witnesses will the be focus of a presentation 12:30 p.m. April 17 in room 126 Memorial Library by Douglas Greenberg, executive director of the Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education at the University of Southern California.
The Shoah Foundation Digital Library is one of the world’s largest digital libraries, containing about 120,000 hours of interviews in 32 languages. In its compressed version, the collection is about 200 terabytes in size (200,000 gigabytes); uncompressed, it is about 12 petabytes (12 million gigabytes). Since even the largest hard drives are currently measured in terabytes, petabytes are used to measure the storage space of multiple hard drives or other collections of data.
To house and facilitate digital access to the archive, the foundation built a Digital Library System, a robotic system of digital tapes. When prompted, the Digital Library System's robotic arm accesses the appropriate interview from a spinning bank of digital tapes.
The entire archive is indexed and catalogues with a unique software system created by the Institute, and it is now available in its entirety at a number of institutions in the United States and abroad.
Greenberg, who is also a history professor at USC, said the presentation will “be of interest both to specialists in digital libraries and to faculty and students in history and Jewish studies with a focus on the Holocaust.”
The lecture is sponsored by the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies and the UW-Madison Libraries.
