Filled with stories of community, betrayal, trauma, and survival, the Orange County Holocaust Oral History Project includes more than 150 firsthand accounts of Orange County residents who experienced the Holocaust.
Featuring interviews gathered in the 1990s by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of Orange County, the collection held in UCI Libraries’ Special Collection and Archives includes a wide range of experiences, from Jewish ghettos and death camps to underground resistance efforts and refugee children.
These interviews are currently on VHS tapes, and due to their fragility cannot be played on modern video equipment. As a result, these stories are inaccessible and may be lost to history.
To preserve these stories for the future, UCI Libraries have prioritized the digitization of this remarkable collection of oral histories unique to the Orange County region. Digitizing this collection and creating full-text, searchable transcripts will allow us to make the interviews available online to scholars and the broader community. Once completed, this digitization project will achieve five key goals:
- Preserve the VHS cassettes and convert the interviews into digital videos.
- Create and publish full-text transcripts of the oral histories.
- Catalog the electronic records with keywords and descriptions to make them easily discoverable.
- Develop a finding aid with detailed information about the collection.
- Provide free online access to the digitized collection.
Your gift to UCI Libraries this Giving Day will ensures that these stories are preserved and made available to the public for generations to come.
You can learn more about this collection on the Libraries website.
| Rank | State | Gifts |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | CA | 35 |
| 2 | OH | 1 |
| 2 | IL | 1 |
