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Last update - 09:48 25/09/2008 Steven Spielberg Holocaust archive 'makes aliyah' By Orr Hirschauge Tags: Yad Vashem, Steven Spielberg  "We may be living in something of a bubble, and I don't mean investment bubble - I mean reality bubble," Tim O'Reilly, a guru of the global technology community said this week. "These are pretty depressing times in a lot of ways," he groused, showing the audience a number of Facebook applications such as the one allowing surfers to toss virtual sheep at each other, or to drink virtual beer. "You have to ask yourself - are we working on the right things?" The disenchanted O'Reilly would probably have liked the joint project by Yad Vashem and the global storage company EMC, which are collaborating on bringing more than 200,000 hours of video to Israel. The images include 52,000 interviews with Holocaust survivors, prepared and stored by the Shoah Foundation Institute, a Steven Spielberg creation at the University of Southern California (USC). The testimonies will be added to a Yad Vashem collection of about 10,000 accounts that have been filmed on video since 1989, and some 5,000 films dealing with the Holocaust produced all over the world. The collections will be made accessible to the public within the next few days. Advertisement The collection at USC is archived on analogue recordings with limited accessibility. Only the catalog of movies and a relatively few minutes of video are available on-line. "The USC has robotic systems that pull out recordings requested by users. The process takes a few minutes each time," relates Vad Vashem CIO Michael Lieber. "After receiving a donation from Sheldon Adelson and EMC, we decided to fly the material to Israel in a consolidated storage system, although transferring so much material is rather unusual. As part of the project, a number of EMC representatives came to the Shoah Institute to copy all of the testimonies over a period of a few weeks - more than 200 terabytes - to archive systems that were then flown to Israel. A senior EMC officer relates that the archive server arrived in Israel in less than optimal conditions. "One of the crates was taken off the plane at the airport and left in the open air in the rain - we were very concerned that water would seep into the systems. We brought them to our offices and checked them with apprehension. After we made sure that all the information had been retained and intact, we transferred it to Jerusalem." The systems weigh more than a ton. "It was no trivial logistical campaign," the EMC official added. YouTube in the service of history Within the next few days, the movies will be available for Video on Demand viewing at the Yad Vashem viewing center, founded three years ago. Lieber says that the center's top priority is to get the material onto the Internet. "Initially, we will use YouTube, so we can at least post sections of the interviews" he promises, noting that Yad Vashem would prefer to put the entire archive on line, but technological, legal and especially financing problems make this a difficult task. Lieber says that Yad Vashem computers contain about 500 terabytes of archived documents, pictures, voice and video files. "We are operating an enormous digitization system," he concludes. At present, movie searches can be performed based on a limited number of search keys: names, dates and places. In addition , there are some rudimentary tags that the Holocaust fund has added to the movies, allowing viewers to skip between sections of the movie. The movies currently have no transcripts. Lieber says that Yad Vashem is considering the possibility of making use of voice search tools, but although they have consulted with a number of leading technology companies in the field, no satisfactory solution has been found. "The type of material we are dealing with presents difficult hurdles for voice recognition software, because of the emotionality in the material and the plethora of languages. Programs that do an excellent job transcripting news reports have a lot of difficulty when operated on the types of interviews that we are dealing with. Witnesses telling their story can suddenly halt under a deluge of memories. In these cases, the system, which analyzes breaks in speech, separates the first part from the continuation. For the viewer, the section ends at the height of the tension. Related articles: Yad Vashem launches Arabic Web site to combat Holocaust denial Steven Spielberg donates $1M to Pennsylvania Jewish history museum Spielberg's Shoah Foundation to document Darfur, other atrocities Bookmark to del.icio.us   Asleep at the wheel Sharon told 1973 probe that IDF top brass was clueless in Yom Kippur War. Laughing at Hitler Clips parodying film The Downfall make their way onto the Web.   1.   What for? 12:28  |  Philip 25/09/08   2.   response to philip 04:11  |  aussie 26/09/08   3.   We`ll allways 06:22  |  Haim 26/09/08   4.   It`s a pity Yad Vashem is not privately controlled because 22:38  |  midget 27/09/08

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