Visual History Archive as a Multimedia Tool for Working with the Vivid History of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

The work aim is to describe and reflect on the tool created to search the world's largest collection of video individual testimonies. The Visual History Archive is an online portal from USC Shoah Foundation that allows users to search through and view 52,000 oral history audiovisual testimonies of survivors and witnesses of the 2nd word war. Each video testimony has been indexed by 62,000 terms by assigning them to the relevant one-minute segments of each testimony. That allows you to find fragments about specific topics from over 7 million minutes of recordings. It is the only system in the world, still hardly known in Poland. While it brings users great conven-ience, it can affect a cursory work with narratives. This is because the primary purpose oral history is to show the process of remembering and experiences the past more than finding single facts.