By Stephen Naron, Director, Fortunoff Video Archive
The precursor to the Fortunoff Video Archive began in New Haven, Connecticut in 1979 as a grassroots organisation known as the Holocaust Survivors Film Project (HSFP). Formed by Dori Laub, a psychiatrist and child survivor, and Laurel Vlock, a local television personality, the HSFP was the first sustained effort to videotape Holocaust survivors and witnesses. In 1981, the original collection of 183 testimonies was deposited at Yale University Library, and the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies opened its doors to the public in 1982. Since then, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies (FVAHT) has recorded and preserved witness testimonies in North and South America, across Europe, and in Israel, and we continue to do so at our studio in New Haven. The collection now consists of more than 4,400 testimonies comprising 12,000 hours of audiovisual material and is available to researchers, educators, and the general public at more than 200 access sites worldwide.
The very birth of the Fortunoff Archive was inextricably tied to an embrace of new technology. We must remember that in the 1970s, broadcast video was still a relatively new technology, not as ubiquitous as in subsequent decades when VHS and digital video could be recorded cheaply and easily. Moreover, it wasn’t just the use of video: the Fortunoff Archive consistently applied emerging technologies to further its mission of preservation, dicoverability and accessibility. For example, it was one of the first archival or “special collections” at Yale to be cataloged and described in an early electronic union database, known as RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network), and one of the first collections on campus with its own website.
RLIN allowed researchers in different locations to search for testimonies on specific topics. Quite the information revolution: entering descriptions of testimonies in RLIN reflects a commitment to innovation in the service of the research community.
Considering this tradition of innovation, it is no surprise that the Fortunoff Archive is actively supporting the current effort – under the leadership of the Association of Jewish Refugees, and the support of Lord Pickles and the UK government -- to develop a portal presenting testimonies of survivors from the UK. The value of such a discovery portal is clear, and in line with the Fortunoff Archive’s ongoing efforts to break down some of the barriers that exist both in the physical and virtual worlds between collections (for another example, please see Let Them Speak, a digital humanities project that allows researchers to search across thousands of transcripts of testimonies from three different collections, FVAHT, USC Shoah Foundation, and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). As a member of the newly established “working group,” consisting of collection stewards and experts on video testimony, we are committed to the idea of this portal as an important demonstration of what is possible when multiple collection-holders cooperate for the greater good of the research community, as well as the families of survivors.
The goal is an ambitious one, perhaps even impossible depending on how one defines “UK testimonies”: to build a comprehensive database on a national scale that will aid family members in the location of testimonies of their loved ones held in disparate archives, as well as to serve as a research hub allowing scholars to search across and locate UK Holocaust testimonies. But is a laudable goal, as is any effort of this kind to encourage research and educational use of video testimonies, which for so long have been treated as difficult, “second class” primary sources by many in the scholarly community.
Efforts to build portals like this, of course, are nothing new, since the dawn of the digital age opened up the dream of a world in which all information, now in digital form, could be made accessible, just one click away, at least theoretically. Digitisation has been essential for preservation, and it has allowed an exponential increase in access to our collections. However, I’d suggest that technology isn’t the primary reason why this information utopia (even in our small niche of audiovisual testimonies of Holocaust survivors) has yet to emerge. The real challenge, it appears, has been and continues to be a political one, not a technical one. Institutions guard their collections and reputations closely, and resources, both human and financial, are tied up with the missions of individual archives. This is another reason why this current attempt at a portal, once again, is a step in the right direction. It is an assertion, by multiple institutions, that the time has come to go beyond just digital access to individual collections towards new efforts to interconnect digitised collections.
A welcome development, for certain, but it is also important to remember that digitisation and enhanced discovery access does not come without certain potential downsides. For instance, increased digital access to collections has also challenged our traditional way of engaging with testimonies, as well as the researchers working with testimony. One of the things that is missing, in this new brave world, where anyone, anywhere can log on and use the digital collection, is the lack of a personal connection or interaction between the researcher and the archivist. In the past, every researcher who wanted to use the Fortunoff Archive had to make the pilgrimage to New Haven to use the collection. There was almost always a physical meeting between the archivist and the researcher. For decades, that archivist was Joanne W. Rudof, who had worked as the archive since 1984 and served as an interviewer on dozens of testimonies. She knew (and still knows) the collection, backwards and forwards, having also managed the tapings of all the affiliated projects worldwide. Her expertise could be the difference between a successful research visit and an unsuccessful research visit. This expertise cannot be integrated into a database, or a portal.
We need to be aware of challenges like this, even as we embrace the “idea” of a UK Testimony Portal. Whatever portals and databases we build, we need to do our best to not strip context and provenance away, presenting the materials as thousands of isolated files to be mined at will. For example, this portal won’t solve the problem that there is a great deal of non-digital (or yet to be digitised) context and essential information that researcher could use to help understand each testimony. Files and information not included in the actual video, but produced in the margins. The (video) marginalia, to analogize with medieval manuscripts. Who were the interviewers? What were their motivations? When and why was the recording made? Was there a preinteview process? Where are all those forms?
For instance, at the Fortunoff Archive, our standard method was for interviewers to contact the survivor in advance of the taping and ask a series of standard questions. We have complete preinterview forms for most testimonies, and these include large amounts of information that may not make it into the actual recordings. The interviewers use these pre-interviews to prepare themselves for the recording, to familiarise themselves with the witness’ story, the names of siblings, their parents’ professions, the town they lived in, the deportations, ghettos and camps. But once they entered the interview, the studio, the interviewee can take the recording in directions unforeseen. In fact, our methodology depended on that, since it was designed to provide maximum agency to the witness, to allow the witness to tell their story as they desire. That means, however, almost certainly that some topics would not be addressed. What to do with these pre-interview forms? How to leverage this metadata?
There are also large amounts of correspondence between the archive and certain interviewers and affiliated projects which recorded the testimonies in locations outside New Haven. Sometimes, there is considerable correspondence between the archive and specific witnesses, before and after their recording. All of this information in our active files are not open to research, but would provide enormous insights if we could find a way to make it available to researchers. Finally, in some cases we even have additional materials give to us by survivors, copies of photographs, etc. And while there is a mention of this in the catalogue record, how many researchers see this small note, and make the actual connection? And if everyone is a remote user now, digital researchers, they can’t view the physical items anyway since they are still only available on site at Yale. None of this will be in the portal, and all of the institutions in the working group, I would guess, face similar dilemmas.
One of the most potentially confounding and time-consuming, as well as political aspects of creating portals like this, is that the collocation of thousands of individuals testimonies, “files,” in a large disparate databases with a federated search often means that local archive praxis and metadata standard are flattened, making searches less effective. Also, different institutions have different resources and metadata, for instance, only some have full transcripts, others indexes, some both, some neither nor. Pooled together, will the testimonies with transcripts receive more attention, since full text search capabilities allow researchers to cherry-pick content, and perhaps (god forbid!) even ignore the testimony as a complete recording, worthy of being watched from start to finish, as they just dip their toes in search of a small historical details that might be addressed in just a few minutes of a longer multi-hour life story. Portals, while welcome, also increase the risk of the decontextualisation, of losing the big picture, as well as the small picture of an individual’s life in a sea of data.
Naturally, there are many advantages to embracing the development of a UK Portal, and hopefully other national portals that might follow on the heels of this project (again, although a welcome idea, I do wonder why it should be tackled on a national scale. It would seem to me that if the recording of video testimony of Holocaust survivors is a global phenomenon, and it is, what we truly need is a portal for all video testimonies). Also, as our local experience at the Fortunoff Archive has shown, ease of digital access indeed results in increased use. More researchers using the collection provides more eyes and ears evaluating the thousands of hours of testimony, identifying the important revelations that, I would argue, are only available in testimony. All of these new digital users can also help to identify errors, and make connections, which in turn help enhance the description and metadata for the future generations. In a networked world, where digital assets can be housed one place but discovered and consumed elsewhere, out little, separate manicured gardens are not serving the needs of the families and researchers. For example, a librarian at USC took a list of last names of the survivors in our collection and matched them with survivors in the USC database. He discovered more than 1000 shared survivors – one can only imagine the value of comparing these different testimonies of the same survivor given at different point in time. That information, protected by policies of privacy at the Fortunoff Archive, could not have been shared without the pressure of expectations around digital access and digital technology. What other connections are waiting to be established between other collections of testimony – audiovisual or the thousands of handwritten testimonies taken in the immediate post-war period.
I am grateful for this imitative, whether it proves an unqualified success or not (I hope it will), at the very least in its mission of tearing down not just barriers to access and discovery of testimonies, but in encouraging cross-institutional cooperation and breaking down the much more fortified barriers between collections.