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Links to Other Useful Oral
History Websites:
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The OHA was established
in 1966, and seeks to bring together all persons interested
in oral history as a way of collecting human memories.
With an international membership, the OHA serves a
broad and diverse audience. Local historians, librarians
and archivists, students, journalists, teachers, and
academic scholars from many fields have found that
the OHA provides both professional guidance and a
collegial environment for sharing information.
In addition to fostering communication among its members,
the OHA encourages standards of excellence in the
collection, preservation, dissemination, and uses
of oral testimony. To guide and advise those concerned
with oral documentation, the OHA has established a
set of goals, guidelines, and evaluation standards
for oral history interviews. The association also
recognizes outstanding achievement in oral history
through an awards program. Awards are given in the
categories of publication, nonprint media productions,
teaching, and oral history projects. |
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The Miller Center gathers new knowledge
about the American presidency and our government,
shares that knowledge with scholars, officials and
the public, and contributes to the contemporary debate
about public policy. |
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The East Midlands Oral History Archive
(EMOHA), based at the Centre for Urban History is
a three year lottery-funded project which will create
the first large-scale archive of oral history recordings
in the East Midlands. |
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In 1974 the Board
of Directors of the American Bar Foundation authorized
the organization of an Oral History Program for the
purpose of assembling a historical record about the
legal profession and the organized bar. During the
following two years Olavi Maru of the American Bar
Foundation conducted over fifty interviews with a
group of former and current officers of the American
Bar Association that included Lewis Powell, Dallin
Oaks, Geoffrey Hazard, Jr., and A. James Casner. Many
of the interviewees had been active in ABA affairs
as early as the 1930s and witnessed watershed events
not only in ABA history, but American legal history
in general. |
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This project has preserved
a spoken and visual record of a way of life. The collection
of interviews with, and photographs of fishermen,
members of their families and others associated with
the fisheries, documents elements of vital regional
industry, and forms a permanent record of the recalled
memory of the region's commercial fishery throughout
much of the Twentieth Century. The could not have
been accomplished without the support, good spirit
and cooperation of the fishing people of Stonington.
Through their experiences we can learn much about
the fortunes of America's fishing industries. |
The Project is a collection
of taped and transcribed interviews of individuals
who have helped to make or witnessed the history of
Greenwich since 1890. Interviews of the widest interest
are published in book form for the Library's reference
and circulating collections, and for sale. Three interviews
have also been released as audio books. To date, the
collection contains more than 600 interviews and 125
books.
Begun in 1973, and co-sponsored by the Greenwich Library
and the Historical Society of the Town of Greenwich,
the Project was the Library's contribution to the
nation's Bicentennial celebration. Since 1977, it
has been a permanent committee of the Friends of the
Greenwich Library.
To access titles in the Oral History Collection, visit
the Greenwich Library Home Page. Interviews are listed
in the catalog by title, narrator's name, and subject(s).
(You must have telnet capability to access the on-line
catalog).
All the interviews have been transcribed and indexed,
and most are kept in the Library's Local History Reference
section, where they are available to the public. Tapes
may be audited by appointment. A cumulative index
is also available. More than 125 of the interviews
have been edited, illustrated and published as books
for general circulation and sale.
The Oral History Project office is on the Lower Level
of the Greenwich Library, 101 West Putnam Avenue,
Greenwich, CT, 06830. Office hours are 10 AM to 2
PM on Monday through Thursday. Summer hours are by
appointment. The Oral History office telephone number
is 203 622-7945. |
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A portion of the oral
history interviews in the Billy Graham Center Archives
have been transcribed and a portion of those transcribed
are available on this gopher.
ANYONE USING THESE TRANSCRIPTS PLEASE SEND A NOTE
TO THE ARCHIVES STAFF TELLING US SO, INCLUDING YOUR
NAME, LOCATION AND A BRIEF (TEN WORD OR LESS) DESCRIPTION
OF YOUR PROJECT). THE RESPONSE TO ACCESSIBILITY OF
THE TRANSCRIPTS ON THIS GOPHER, WHICH WILL DETERMINE
WHETHER WE PUT OTHER TRANSCRIPTS AND MATERIALS ON.
There is a separate directory for each oral history
collection and that directory includes a biography
of the interviewee, a list of the topics covered on
the tapes (called an index), a scope and content description
of other materials in the collection (if there are
any), a location record for the tapes, and the actual
transcripts. The index is geared to cassette copies
of the interviews and since each side of the cassette
is normally shorter than the reel of the original
tape, usually the index for an interview is divided
into "side 1", "side 2" and in
many cases "side 3". This division has no
relevance to the transcripts. Note: This gopher contains
only the transcripts and not any other documents,
even if they are mentioned in the scope and content
description.
Most of the interviews in the Archives are with foreign
missionaries, although a few are with other types
of Christian workers. We have tried to put a sampling
of our most frequently used transcripts on this gopher. |
The Chicago Architects Oral History Project was begun
in 1983 under the auspices of the Art Institute's
Department of Architecture to document the life experiences
of architects who shaped the urban environment in
Chicago. It is intended not only to fill an existing
void in the literature but to go beyond the facts
to explore motivations and influences, behind-the-scenes
stories, and personal reflections. The current collection
of fifty-five narratives contains comprehensive life-review
documents as well as shorter focused interviews. Included
in the collection are groupings of Skidmore, Owings
and Merrill partners and associates, students of Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe, and architects who defy classification.
These oral histories explore the development of Chicago's
architecture and planning from the 1890s to the 1990s.
A cumulative index is available for easy access to
individual transcripts.
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The Rochester Oral History Project will examine the
cultural adaptation of the various ethnic communities
in Rochester. The project is directed by Professor
Larry Hudson, who is particularly interested in examining
the impact of land ownership on family structure as
African-Americans moved from slavery to freedom; plantation
to town; town to city; and from south to north.
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The U.S. Social Security
Administration's (SSA) history site on the internet
(http://www.ssa.gov/history/history.html) contains
information about SSA's collection of oral histories
relating to Social Security and Medicare. In addition
to a catalog of SSA's oral histories, multi-media
transcripts of selected interviews are available online.
The oral histories can be accessed at: ( http://www.ssa.gov/history/orallist.html).
Information about the SSA History Archives and general
information for researchers is found at: ( http://www.ssa.gov/history/histwelc.html). |
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This office has a collection of audiotaped
and transcribed oral interviews that preserve the
knowledge, experiences, and recollections of leaders
in many fields of history, politics, and culture.
While the focus is national political history, there
are also collections on China, Argentina, and the
Middle East. The archive holds approximately 7,000
interviews, filling 7,000,000 pages of transcript.
The interviews are archived in the Rare Book and Manuscript
Library. To register to read the interviews, you must
first come to the Oral History Research Office. The
staff of the Office is available for consultation
on faculty, student, and community service oral history
projects. |
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Oral History American Music is the only ongoing project
in the field of music dedicated to the collection
and preservation of oral and video memoirs directly
in the voices of those who make our music history.
Founded in 1971, the archive has become an extensive
repository of unique source materials on 20th century
American music. Users of the collection come from
academic and non-academic fields. Many publications,
papers, dissertations, radio and television productions
derive from these testimonies, among them: Charles
Ives Remembered: An Oral History by Vivian Perlis,
the two volume autobiography of Aaron Copland, books
on Duke Ellington and Paul Hindemith, and documentary
films for public televisions on Copland, Eubie Blake,
and John Cage. Transcripts of interviews are available
for purchase or through Inter-Library Loan; tapes
may be listened to in the offices of Oral History,
American Music.
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The Bland County History
Archives are maintained by the students of Rocky Gap
High School in Rocky Gap,Virginia. It consists of
over 200 oral interviews, cemetery catalogues, hundreds
of photographs, maps, and artifacts. The collection
is housed in the former Honaker Church building which
is the oldest extant building in Rocky Gap. The holdings
are continuously being added to.The goal of the archives
is to preserve the stories of the people of Bland
County and present them to the public in a variety
of ways. Many of the stories are the stories of the
last people to have been born and raised in a real
log cabin back up a holler or on top of a mountain.
These are the unique stories of Appalachia as told
by its people. |
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The Hogan Jazz Archive
at Tulane University lists the oral histories on file
in alphabetical sequence by name of interviewee. Most
of the interviews have hard copies, ranging from transcripts,
and digests, to notes. Usually, upon completion of
an interview, notes were compiled on persons and bands
mentioned in the talk. These notes are rough outlines,
of only limited value to the researcher. Digests represent
a more coherent, albeit abbreviated version of the
interview. All the highlights are present, while the
casual remarks have been left out. Most of the hard
copies available are in the digest format. Transcripts
are word-for-word renderings of the interview, allowing
a patron to read along as the tape is played. |
The University of
Maryland Library's audio holdings consist mainly of
oral histories and transcription discs. There are
nearly 1000 oral histories, interviews, and speeches
(most of which have transcripts) by such notables
as Norman Corwin, Edgar Bergen, Niles Trammell, Frank
E. Mullen, Rosel H. Hyde, and Leonard H. Goldenson.
The Library also maintains the Westinghouse News Collection
(1958-1982), which consists mainly of raw feeds from
the Washington bureau. The Library houses 3300 transcription
discs, including over 1000 commercials in the Radio
Advertising Bureau Collection, programming dating
from 1925, V-Discs, and news reports. |
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The Regional History
Project at the University Library of the University
of California, Santa Cruz has been documenting the
history of the Central Coast of California and the
institutional history of UC Santa Cruz since 1963,
through oral history. Their web site includes the
complete catalog of their collection, a photo gallery
of historical images of the Central Coast of California,
Oral History resources, and links to other oral history
sites on the Internet. |
| The Regional Oral
History Office at The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley
had its beginnings in the work of the historian of
the West for whom the library is named, Hubert Howe
Bancroft. Bancroft recognized that missing from his
vast collection of books, journals, maps, and manuscripts
on western North America were the living memories
of many of the participants in the development of
California and the West. In the 1860s he launched
an ambitious project to interview and create autobiographies
of a diverse group of pioneer Westerners and the resulting
volumes of "Dictations" continue to provide
valuable primary source for historians.
The Regional Oral History Office (ROHO) was established
in 1954 to continue the Bancroft tradition by preserving,
through carefully researched, tape-recorded, and transcribed
interviews, a historical record of our times that
would otherwise be lost to future scholars. The office
has added more than 1250 oral history transcripts
to The Bancroft Library, documenting diverse aspects
of twentieth century history in the Bay Area, California,
and the nation. Major subject areas of ROHO interviews
include law and government, resources and the environment,
and science and technology. These collections are
supplemented by the Library's Donated Oral Histories
Collection, which preserves and makes accessible for
scholarly research interviews recorded by other organizations
or individuals. |
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The Institute of American
Indian Studies and the South Dakota Oral History Center
at the University of South Dakota, Vermillion administers
one of the largest oral history collections of its
kind in the United States with archives containing
nearly 5,000 recorded interviews. Established in 1995,
the work of the Institute of American Indian Studies
includes organizing campus programs to promote education
and awareness of American Indian culture, issues,
and problems; assisting USD efforts to recruit and
retain American Indian students, faculty, and staff;
encouraging increased levels of research on American
Indian life; and strengthening relations with tribes,
tribal colleges, and other appropriate American Indian
organizations in the state and region. |
Based on the work
of the Michigan Oral History Council, founded in 1979,
the Michigan Oral History Association holds conferences,
publishes a newsletter, conducts oral history workshops
and sponsors an oral history awards program. We are
a state affiliate of the OHA. |
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This Oral History
Collection contains tape recordings and transcripts
which fall into three main categories: interviews
with eminent Australians in fields where the library
has special strengths(eg Commonwealth politics, bureaucracy,
the arts and intellectual life); interviews with members
of groups; and folklore, including song, dance music,
recitations, and stories.
Access to the material is controlled
by clearances obtained from interviewees and informants
- in some cases material is restricted for very long
periods, for example, up to 100 years, and in other
cases, access is immediate. Because audio tape is
a fragile medium, requiring special preservation treatment,
there is often a time lag between the acquisition
of recordings and their eventual availability for
research use. Access can be expedited by paying an
audio reproduction fee. The National Library holds
the papers of many interviewees in the Manuscript
Collection.
Provided access clearances permit, oral history materials
can be accessed through the Oral History Reading Room
or on inter-library loan via the Library's Document
Supply Services. Copies of tapes and transcripts can
also be purchased. Many of the recordings which are
publicly available are catalogued and listed on the
Library's On-line Public Access Catalogue (OPAC).
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The Oral History Collection
of the JS Battye Library located on the third floor,
consists of recorded interviews with people who are
Western Australian by birth or migration. The earliest
interviews are with people born in the 1870s. Included
in the collection, though not oral history by definition,
are sound recordings of radio broadcasts, conferences
and meetings, talks, folklore and poetry readings. |
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In recent years oral
history has emerged as a powerful means of recording
and preserving the unique memories and life experiences
of people whose stories might otherwise have been
lost. It enables us to eavesdrop on events, feelings
, attitudes and ways of life which have been hidden
from history, and thus create a more vivid and accurate
picture of our past.
In museums, oral history can enliven static displays
and more directly engage visitors in their own past.
Reminiscence techniques are also used in older people's
residential homes and in the community, both to entertain
and encourage a sense of self-worth. Oral history
also now has a firm place in the National Curriculum
for History in schools and as an interactive and shared
experience offers children a rare chance to question
history face to face whilst bringing generations together.
The NSA collects audio and video taped interviews
as well as carrying out its own programme of life
story recordings. As the national centre for oral
history in Britain, we provide advice and training
in oral history methods, and maintain close contact
with oral history groups in Britain and abroad. |
The U.S. Naval Institute's
Oral History program exists for the purpose of preserving
and making available the recollections of Navy and
Coast Guard personnel. The Naval Institute tape-records
interviews with people who have made history in the
naval profession. The interviews are then transcribed,
annotated, indexed, and bound. Since the inception
of the program in 1969, nearly 200 bound volumes have
been completed, and interviews have been done to produce
dozens more. Typically, the format calls for an entire
life history of a career Navy man or woman. The discussion
of various tours of duty during the course of a career
generally covers a wide range of topics and personalities.
There have also been some specialized projects involving
early WAVE officers, the Polaris ballistic missile
submarine program, Vietnam War prisoners of war, Fleet
Admiral Chester Nimitz, and the first black naval
officers.
The library of bound volumes of transcripts is available
for research at Preble Hall in the U.S. Naval Institute's
history, reference, and preservation division. The
memoirs in the collection have been indexed by subject
so that researchers may obtain individual pages of
transcripts dealing with their specific topic. |
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The Center's collection
dates to 1968, when the first interviews were conducted
by Donald Anderson, then director of the University's
Photographic Archives. To supplement the Photographic
Archives collections, Anderson interviewed photographers
such as Frank Shook of Caufield and Shook Photographers.
In the same era, the University's Department of History
created an Oral History Center under the direction
of Professor Charles Berry. Berry received the Anderson
interviews and began a project to document the Louisville
Orchestra. Carl G. Ryant succeeded Berry as director
of the center.
With the establishment of the University Archives
in 1973, University Archivist William J. Morison initiated
interviews with faculty, former students, and administrators
in the UofL community. The efforts of the Archives
and Department of History were united in 1978 in the
current Oral History Center, with co-directors from
the history department and archives. |
The Association for
Diplomatic Studies, a non-profit, tax-exempt organization
was established in 1986 to enhance the training of
foreign affairs personnel and to instill in the public
a greater appreciation for our diplomatic history.
The Association's Foreign Affairs Oral History Program
was established in 1988 and is housed in the Lauinger
Library of Georgetown University. The collection is
comprised of oral histories taken from a number of
projects, all concerning the experiences of those
employed in diplomacy and consular affairs and their
families.
The oral history collection includes interviews done
under the auspices of the Foreign Service History
Center of George Washington University, which was
amalgamated into the Foreign Service History Program,
the Foreign Service Family Project, the Women Ambassadors'
Project, the United States Information Agency Alumni
Association Project, the Senior Officers' Project
and others.
The majority of these interviews were conducted by
retired Foreign Service personnel on a volunteer basis,
directed by the Oral History Program. The interviews
are unclassified, and unless so marked are open for
use by researchers. Most interviews have been transcribed
and then returned to the person interviewed for editing.
The transcript deposited in the Lauinger Library's
Special Collections Division is the edited version,
and is not a word for word rendition of the cassette
tape. Tapes are available for auditing, if desired.
As a practical matter, the editing generally represents
little substantive change, with those interviewed
usually correcting dates, names and other information
that may have been missed during an interview. The
final transcripts were not professionally edited and
any spelling or other mistakes can be blamed on the
Oral History Program, not on the person interviewed. |
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The Vietnam Veterans
Oral History and Folklore Project is engaged in an
ongoing undertaking to collect, preserve and make
better known the folklore, especially the folksongs,
of the Vietnam War.
To most of us, the Vietnam War has a rock and roll
soundtrack. All the songs of the sixties were part
of life in the combat zone; troops listened to music
in the bush and in the bunkers. But there were other
songs in Vietnam, too--the songs made by the American
men and women, civilian and military, who served there,
for themselves.
Some of these were part of the traditional occupational
folklore of the military. The pilots who flew off
the carriers and out of Thailand sang songs that were
known by aviators in the two World Wars and the Korean
War; the grunts knew songs which were sung by their
grandfathers in the trenches in France. Other songs
grew directly out of the Vietnam experience. |
Project for a Netherlands
Oral History Archive on Indonesia 1940-1962
Since August 1994 a group of Dutch historians has
taken the initiative to constitute a national archive
of interviews with Dutchmen about their life experiences
during the late colonial period (1940-1962). Recently
this has resulted in the foundation of the Stichting
Mondelinge Geschiedenis Indonesi‚ (Foundation
for the Oral History of Indonesia).
Staff members from the Royal Institute of Linguistics
and Anthropology (KITLV), the Netherlands State Institute
for War Documentation (RIOD), the International Institute
of Social History (IISG), the History Department of
the Royal Dutch Army Leiden and Utrecht participate
in this Foundation. Chairperson is professor dr. Heather
Sutherland of Amsterdam Free University. The coordinator
is dr. Luc Nagtegaal. |
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The Oral History Department
collects and produces video and audiotaped testimonies
of Holocaust survivors, rescuers, liberators, resistance
fighters, prosecutors, perpetrators, and bystanders.
The mission of the department is to document and preserve
Holocaust testimonies as primary students, researchers,
teachers, and filmmakers to "meet" the people
who experienced or witnessed or perpetrated Nazi genocidal
policies and crimes of the Nazis and their allies
and collaborators.
The Oral History Archive contains more than 2,900
interviews, mostly in English. Some 300 of the videotaped
interviews are of Polish Catholics, Roma and Sinti
("Gypsies"), political prisoners, homosexuals,
resistance fighters, rescuers, liberators, and postwar
prosecutors of Nazi crimes. There are more than 120
Hebrew-language interviews of Jewish survivors who
emigrated to Israel, and more than 80 interviews of
Jehovah's Witnesses who survived Nazi persecution.
The collection includes over 130 audiotaped Interviews
from the Museum's I.D. Card Project and more than
30 interviews prepared for the Permanent Exhibition's
"Testimony" film. Edited segments of some
of the tapes are incorporated into the Center, and
public programs.
Although approximately 400 of the interviews were
produced by the Museum, most of the holdings are the
result of exchanges and collections agreements with
various Holocaust centers. The collection also includes
a large number of individually donated oral testimonies.
The Oral History collection is expanding rapidly.
Collections agreements are pending or being negotiated
with almost every relevant institution in the United
States, and agreements with collections in Canada,
Germany, France, Russia, Ukraine, Poland, South America,
and Australia are now being established. |
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