EMC Donated Products and Services to Store Copy of USC Shoah Foundation Institute’s Archive

EMC Corporation has donated products and services to store a copy of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute‘s archive of nearly 52,000 video testimonials from Holocaust survivors and witnesses, and make it accessible through Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority in Jerusalem.

"We want to remove barriers between people and this information," said Michael Lieber, Yad Vashem’s CIO. "Our mission is to commemorate the victims and document and educate about the Holocaust. EMC’s generous donation enables us to make this information readily accessible to the widest public possible. The Holocaust is often very hard to comprehend, but when you hear the words of someone who survived Auschwitz, it hits home."

Established in 1953, Yad Vashem documents the history of the Jewish people during the Holocaust, preserving the memory and story of each of the six million victims, as well as those who survived the Holocaust. Through the EMC Information Heritage Initiative donation, the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education was able to copy more than 135 terabytes — approximately 100,000 hours — of testimonies belonging to the Institute onto an EMC CLARiiON(R) networked storage system. This system was then shipped from USC in Los Angeles, Calif. to Yad Vashem in Israel, where the videos will be made accessible at Yad Vashem’s Visual Center.

"The USC Shoah Foundation Institute has been working diligently to distribute the entire archive of testimonies to universities and institutions around the world," said Sam Gustman, Chief Technology Officer at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute. "We are thrilled that EMC provided the technology necessary to enable Yad Vashem to be added to the list of institutions with access to the archive."

"Yad Vashem provides the world’s largest repository of information on the Holocaust to ensure six million lives are never forgotten and the voices of survivors are not lost," said Joel Schwartz, EMC’s Senior Vice President, Storage Platforms. "We’re honored that our donation and our information infrastructure technologies will help preserve and share this information for years to come."

Introduced in May 2007, the EMC Information Heritage Initiative advances the preservation and protection of humanity’s information heritage to make important historical documents and cultural artifacts readily accessible for the future. To date, EMC has donated more than $20 million through the EMC Information Heritage Initiative and supported numerous information heritage preservation projects for organizations, such as the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Herzogin Anna Amalia Library and the Search for the Jikji Campaign.