The University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, founded by Steven Spielberg, has been in 61 countries around the world collecting video testimony from genocide survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust, Rwandan, Cambodian, Armenian, Nanjing Massacre and the Sudan genocide, with the intent of bringing in more collections over time.

108,000 hours of video to date is managed by the Shoah Foundation archive which is built for mass digitization, cataloging, digital preservation, access and educational system integration. The technology used to build Shoah Foundation archives has been adopted by USC Libraries to build a "cloud archive" called the USC Digital Repository that allows owners of digital collections of interest to USC to be digitized, catalogued, digitally preserved and to provide secure or public access to those collections.

Numerous researchers sufficing National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health data management plans, as well as groups in Hollywood, have started using this service. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and Warner Brothers have placed 50 petabytes of data into the USC Digital Repository to date.

Visit the USC Shoah Foundation website for more information about the organization.

Speaker bio: Sam Gustman has been chief technology officer (CTO) of the Shoah Foundation since 1994 and was responsible for overseeing the 2006 move of the foundation's archives from Universal Studios to USC. Gustman is also associate dean at the USC Libraries, where he holds a faculty appointment and oversees all technology for 23 USC Libraries.

Gustman provides technical leadership for the integration of the USC Shoah Foundation's digital archives into USC's collection of electronic resources, ensuring the archive's accessibility for academic and research communities at USC and around the world. He is responsible for global deployment of the USC Shoah Foundation online digital literacy systems to secondary education schools. He is also responsible for the operations, preservation, and cataloging of the institute's 8-petabyte digital library, one of the largest public video databases in the world.

Gustman has more than twenty years of leadership experience in information technology. He has been the primary investigator on National Science Foundation research projects with a cumulative funding total of more than $8 million. He has given presentations at numerous professional conferences and been published in several academic journals. He has a bachelor of science in engineering, with a focus in computer engineering, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.