High-tech helps to remember, Video servers from EMC enable Spielberg's Holocaust memorial

When filmmaker Stephen Spielberg finished filming the award-winning Holocaust memorial film "Schindler's List," he decided that he didn't want his involvement with Holocaust survivors to end there.

The result was the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, an organization devoted to collecting videotaped testimony from Holocaust survivors around the world. The Los Angeles-based foundation set up regional offices in New York and Toronto in 1994 and began videotaping interviews that summer. Since then, additional regional offices have been opened in Boston, Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia, as well as in 11 international locations.

As of mid-April, the foundation had amassed 29,309 interviews in 41 countries. Interviews have been conducted by 2600 volunteers in 28 languages. After the interviews are completed, the tapes are shipped to Los Angeles for storage.

But Spielberg wanted to expand his vision to researchers and educators around the world, extending the reach of the tapes beyond Los Angeles. During the last half of 1994, the foundation formed partnerships with the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the Fortunoff Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University and Yad Vashem Museum in Jerusalem. Spielberg then sought a way to allow those institutions to link up with the Los Angeles headquarters, enabling the delivery of broadcast-quality video to each location.

Enter EMC Corp., a Hopkinton, Mass.-based manufacturer of enterprise storage systems. Using five Symmetrix Network Media Storage servers donated by EMC and asynchronous transfer mode technology donated by Fore Systems, the Shoah Foundation has connected each remote location with its central repository in Los Angeles.

"Steven Spielberg is not only a great filmmaker, but he's also very interested in technology, and he recognized early on that he would need good technology to support what he's trying to do," said Gil Press, manager of network storage marketing at EMC.

Upon a request from a researcher at one of the five institutions, the central archive would send the interview over the ATM network to a Symmetrix server at the respective location. The video clip is then sent over an Ethernet network to the desktop. Because the interview is stored locally at the server, the researcher can rewind, fast-forward or pause the clip as needed.

"People can sit down to a PC and, using our search and retrieval software, can play interviews from end to end or search for specific information," Press said. "If you have a researcher doing specific research on a subject, he can request all of the video clips pertinent to that subject, and because the video is stored locally at his site, he can work on it for a few hours, take a break and then come back to it." The Shoah Foundation will begin offering access to the five locations next year and plans to extend access to other repositories shortly thereafter, including schools, museums and Holocaust education resource centers.

NCTA files video parity bid The National Cable Television Association filed a brief with the FCC and the U.S. Copyright Office last week asking that cable have regulatory parity with any multichannel video provider, including direct broadcast satellite carriers. The NCTA argues that everyone allowed to carry local TV signals should have the same responsibilities.

VIDMODEM DELIVERS VIDEO TO THE DESKTOP A new signal processing technology from Objective Communications called VidModem enables the delivery of two-way broadcast-quality video and high-speed data from the wide area network to the desktop without having to rewire the building or interfere with the local area network.