Oral History Centers and Collections (Under Construction)

 

  • American Memory from the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. contains primary source materials on American culture and history. Contributions of the Library of Congress to the National Digital Library. Collection includes prints & photos, documents, motion pictures, and sound recordings. Most sources are in the public domain. Includes a search function.

 

  • Baylor University Institute for Oral History, in Waco, Texas, practicing professional oral history since 1970, offers useful oral history instruction through its e-workshops and its Workshop on the Web resources, including an introduction to the basics of interviewing, tips for collecting family oral histories, and the Baylor University Transcribing Style Guide. A majority of the 5800+ interviews in the collection are available online in transcript format, and complete audio files are now available for 33% of the online collection.

 

 

  • Brooklyn Historical Society's Crossing Borders, Bridging Generations Project in Brooklyn, New York, examines the local history and experiences of mixed-heritage people and families, cultural hybridity, race, ethnicity, and identity. Thirty-five oral histories are intermingled with online exhibits and articles, all of which include audio, transcripts and OHMS-enabled interaction.

 

  • California State University Fullerton - Center for Oral and Public History in Fullerton, California, collects and preserves the stories of distinctive individuals and diverse communities whose historical experiences have shaped the collective memory of Southern California. Over 5000 interviews have been gathered since its inception in 1968, sorted into four major collections: Community, Ethnic, Military & Women.

 

  • California State University Long Beach - Oral History Program in Long Beach, California. Oral History at CSULB is an instructional program offering students an enhanced knowledge of the techniques and methodologies of oral information gathering and its uses in teaching and research. It also serves as an oral history resource for educational and community groups.

 

  • Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, features resources for photographers, writers, filmmakers, scholars of history and literature, teachers, students, and others who struggle to participate in the lives of individuals and communities and to render these lives in documentary works of artistic, literary, and social value.

 

 

 

  • Georgia Government Documentation Project at the Georgia State Library in Atlanta, Georgia, documents the state's political heritage through oral history interviews and collections of associated papers. The GGDP collection includes more than 250 interviews with former governors, legislators, women in politics, African American political activists and leaders, journalists, and numerous other public figures. In addition to the interviews generated by the project, the GGDP actively collects interviews conducted by other scholars of Georgia politics.

 

 

  • Institute of Oral History at the University of Texas El Paso is home to one of the largest border-related oral history collections in the United States. While an emphasis has been on the El Paso-Ciudad Juárez region, the collection also contains interviews dealing with the history of communities all along the U.S.-Mexico border. Current holdings include over 1500 interviews with corresponding transcripts available online.

 

  • Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky, has collected more than 9,000 oral histories that focus on 20th century Kentucky history, Appalachia, Kentucky writers, agriculture, black history, the history of the University of Kentucky, broadcasting, sports, Kentucky medical history, and the experience of Kentucky war veterans. Also the home of the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) access software, which is used extensively now in their archival offerings, with over 2200 interviews currently indexed and online.

 

  • Louisiana State University T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, collects interviews on Louisiana's history, politics, and culture.  Notable in its oral history collections are ongoing projects relating to Louisiana politics, the history of LSU, Louisiana veterans (mostly WWII), and African American history with a special focus on the civil rights movement.

 

  • Michigan State University, The Vincent Voice Library in East Lansing, Michigan, is the largest academic voice library in the United States. It houses a variety of recordings from more than 500,000 persons recorded during the last 100 years. Most items held in the public domain are available for online listening as mp3 files. **Editor's Note: the vast majority of the collection is not of oral history**

 

  • Minnesota Historical Society's Oral History Collection, housed at the Minnesota History Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, began collecting oral histories in 1948. Concentrating on the history of Minnesota,  the oral histories in the collection cover a wide range of topics including politics, business, labor, agriculture, the environment, religion, ethnicity, and education. Over 1600 interviews are available online in both transcript and audio/video formats.

 

  • National Library of Australia Oral History and Folklore Collection in Canberra, Australia, dates back to the 1950s and includes a rich and diverse collection of interviews and recordings with Australians from all walks of life. More than a thousand entries of interviews, music and accents are added to the collection each year. Increasingly the collection is available online or may be requested from the catalogue.

 

 

  • Northeast Archives of Folklore and Oral History, administered by the University of Maine in Orono, Maine, contains an inventory of around 3,000 audio recordings. The holdings are especially strong in documentation of occupations, foodways, community histories, lore and legends, traditional music, social activities, ritual and worship, material culture, and expressive arts. Other topics include logging and the lumbering industry; fishing and lobstering; women in Maine; country and western music; northeastern multi-ethnic culture; labor history; Native Americans; and tourism and hunting.

 

  • Santa Cruz Regional Oral History Project, housed at 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. The site includes the complete catalog of the collection, oral history resources, and links to other oral history sites on the Internet.

 

  • Smithsonian Institutional Oral History Collections:
    • Archives of American Art - Over 2,000 interviews online with HTML or PDF transcripts available, as well as brief MP3 samples of the non-restricted records.

 

  • Social Security Administration History Archives contain over 100 Social Security and Medicare-related oral histories. A catalog of the Archives' holdings and the full transcripts of selected interviews are accessible online. The online interviews contain photographs and soundclips along with transcripts.

  • Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, was founded in 1973 and is now part of the Center for the Study of the American South, concentrating on U.S. southern racial, labor, and gender issues. Over 5300 interviews have been collected, and many have transcripts and/or audio files available in their online database.

 

  • Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, Wisconsin, presents a series of twenty-four interviews featuring Wisconsin citizens who survived the Holocaust. Full transcripts, audio excerpts, and teaching resources are all available online. 

 

  • United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. possesses a collection of over 12,000 Holocaust testimonies. Thousands of these are represented on their online collection in either transcript, audio, or video form. Also available on the site are both a PDF guide to conducting Holocaust interviews and an international database containing information on over 125 organizations where Holocaust oral histories can be found. 

 

 

 

 

 

  • University of Missouri Center for Studies in Oral Tradition in Columbia, Missouri, maintains a national and international focus for interdisciplinary research and scholarship on the world’s oral traditions. It has established a series of paper and web publications aimed at serving a broad academic constituency, including the journal Oral Tradition.

 

 

  • University of South Florida Oral History Program in Tampa, Florida, documents its surrounding community by exploring complex international issues in a local context. Its online collection features over 900 interview transcripts and audio/video files from 23 different projects. 

 

  • University of Utah American West Center in Salt Lake City, Utah, is a regional studies center that has recorded, processed, and preserved over 7,000 oral history interviews since 1964. Over 2000 of these are with native peoples, and several veteran history projects are also found in the collection.

 

 

  • Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, houses the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs. Its oral history collection of over 900 interviews include topics such as working women; local, state, and national politics; radical social and labor movements; education; Detroit African-American communities; and union leadership and rank-and-file experiences.