The arrival in Britain of an archive of tens of thousands of Holocaust testimonies will give much needed historical weight to the experiences of survivors, according to a leading scholar.

David Cesarani, of the Holocaust Research Centre at the University of London, believes that the U.S. video archive, set up 18 years ago by Steven Spielberg, will help to rebalance a picture that has been dominated by the study of the perpetrators of the atrocities of the World War II.

The extraordinary catalogue of personal testimony, collected by the Shoah Foundation Institute since the film director made Schindler's Listin 1993, is housed at the University of Southern California, but on Friday, Jan 27, it was formally shared with academics and students at the research centre at Royal Holloway to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Cesarani believes the archive facility will set British historical research in the right context. "It is going to have a huge impact," he said. "This is an authentic resource for British researchers and historians which will give them access to the experiences of people who have never written anything down. Too much of the history of the Holocaust has been about the perpetrators. The survivors, with a few exceptions, have tended to disappear from the scene."

Smith hopes that non-specialists will also visit the archive. The USC Shoah Foundation Institute is broadening its archive to incorporate testimony from survivors of other genocides. It is collecting testimony in Rwanda, where the Aegis Trust set up the Kigali Memorial Centre in 2004. This year Rwandan and Armenian testimony should be added to the visual history archive.