Oral history is the collection and study of historical information about people, families, important events, or everyday life using audiotapes, videotapes, or transcriptions of planned interviews. These interviews are conducted with people who participated in or observed past events and whose memories and perceptions of these are to be preserved as an aural record for future generations. Oral history strives to obtain information from different perspectives and most of these cannot be found in written sources. Oral history also refers to information gathered in this manner and to a written work based on such data, often preserved in archives and large libraries. Knowledge presented by Oral History (OH) is unique in that it shares the tacit perspective, thoughts, opinions and understanding of the interviewee in its primary form.
The Internet Archive is an American digital library founded on May 10, 1996, and chaired by free information advocate Brewster Kahle. It provides free access to collections of digitized materials like websites, software applications, music, audiovisual and print materials. The Archive is also an activist organization, advocating a free and open Internet. As of January 1, 2023, the Internet Archive holds more than 39 million print materials, 11.6 million pieces of audiovisual content, 2.6 million software programs, 15 million audio files, 4.7 million images, 251,000 concerts and over 828 billion web pages in its Wayback Machine. Their mission is to provide "universal access to all knowledge."
The Library of Congress National Digital Library Program (NDLP) is assembling a digital library of reproductions of primary source materials to support the study of the history and culture of the United States. Begun in 1995 after a five-year pilot project, the program began digitizing selected collections of Library of Congress archival materials that chronicle the nation's rich cultural heritage. In order to reproduce collections of books, pamphlets, motion pictures, manuscripts and sound recordings, the Library has created a wide array of digital entities: bitonal document images, grayscale and color pictorial images, digital video and audio, and searchable e-texts. To provide access to the reproductions, the project developed a range of descriptive elements: bibliographic records, finding aids, and introductory texts and programs, as well as indexing the full texts for certain types of content.
Digitization is the process of converting information into a digital format. The result is the representation of an object, image, sound, document, or signal obtained by generating a series of numbers that describe a discrete set of points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a digital image, for the object, and digital form, for the signal. In modern practice, the digitized data is in the form of binary numbers, which facilitates processing by digital computers and other operations, but digitizing simply means "the conversion of analog source material into a numerical format"; the decimal or any other number system can be used instead.
The Queens Public Library (QPL), also known as the Queens Borough Public Library and Queens Library (QL), is the public library for the borough of Queens, and one of three public library systems serving New York City. It is one of the largest library systems in the world by circulation, having loaned 13.5 million items in the 2015 fiscal year, and one of the largest in the country in terms of the size of its collection. According to its website, the library holds about 7.5 million items, of which 1.4 million are at its central library in Jamaica, Queens. It was named "2009 Library of the Year" by Library Journal.
The Yiddish Book Center Yiddish: ייִדישער ביכער־צענטער, romanized: Yidisher Bikher-Tsenter, located on the campus of Hampshire College in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States, is a cultural institution dedicated to the preservation of books in the Yiddish language, as well as the culture and history those books represent. It is one of ten western Massachusetts museums constituting the Museums10 consortium.
American Memory is an internet-based archive for public domain image resources, as well as audio, video, and archived Web content. Published by the Library of Congress, the archive launched on October 13, 1994, after $13 million was raised in private donations.
Oral history preservation is the field that deals with the care and upkeep of oral history materials, whatever format they may be in. Oral history is a method of historical documentation, using interviews with living survivors of the time being investigated. Oral history often touches on topics scarcely touched on by written documents, and by doing so, fills in the gaps of records that make up early historical documents.
Smithsonian Libraries and Archives is an institutional archives and library system comprising 21 branch libraries serving the various Smithsonian Institution museums and research centers. The Libraries and Archives serve Smithsonian Institution staff as well as the scholarly community and general public with information and reference support. Its collections number nearly 3 million volumes including 50,000 rare books and manuscripts.
The La Guardia and Wagner Archives was established in 1982 at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, New York, to collect, preserve, and make available primary materials documenting the social and political history of New York City, with an emphasis on the mayoralty and the borough of Queens. The purpose of its founding went beyond serving as a repository, but to establish the college as a location for scholarly research. The archives serves a broad array of researchers, journalists, students, scholars, exhibit planners, and policy makers. Its web site provides guidelines to the collections, as well as over 55,000 digitized photographs and close to 2,000,000 digitized documents.
The Maria Rogers Oral History Program, or MROHP, collects and archives oral histories about Boulder County. Started in 1976, the program began with a handful of donated interviews, but now includes more than 1600 interviews, available both on the internet and at the Boulder Public Library's Carnegie Branch Library for Local History.
An Oral History of British Science is an oral history project conducted by National Life Stories at the British Library. The project began in 2009 with funding from the Arcadia Fund, the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851 and a number of other private donors and focuses on audio interviews with British science and engineering figures.
The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) is the official oral history program at the University of Florida. With over 6,500 interviews and more than 150,000 pages of transcribed material, it is one of the premier oral history programs in the United States. SPOHP's mission is "to gather, preserve, and promote living histories of individuals from all walks of life." The program involves staff, undergraduate and graduate students, and community volunteers in its operation.
The Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) is a non-profit organization that specializes in providing research, programming, and organizational tools for libraries, archives, and museums in the New York metropolitan area. The council was founded in 1964 under the Education Law of the State of New York.
Who Speaks for the Negro? is a 1965 book of interviews by Robert Penn Warren conducted with Civil Rights Movement activists. The book was reissued by Yale University Press in 2014. The Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities at Vanderbilt University created the Who Speaks for the Negro? digital archive featuring digitized versions of the original reel-to-reel recordings that Warren compiled for each of his interviewees as well as print materials related to the project, including the transcripts of those recordings, letters written between Warren and the interviewees, and contemporary reviews of the book.
Oral History of American Music (OHAM), founded in 1969, is an oral history project and archive of audio and video recordings consisting mainly of interviews with American classical and jazz musicians. It is a special collection of the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University and housed within the Sterling Memorial Library building in New Haven, Connecticut. It currently holds approximately 3,000 interviews with more than 900 subjects and is considered the definitive collection of its kind.
The Activist Women's Voices collection is an oral history project of 35 women activists who worked in community-based organizations in the New York City area. The project covers the period from 1995 to 2000 and was a project of The City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center's Women's Studies Program and Center for the Study of Women. The digitized collection is made up of women from a diverse cross-section of cultural and ethnic social service organizations including activists from Arab-American, Haitian, Hispanic, African-American, and Asian-American communities. It is held at the Mina Rees Library, within the Graduate Center's B. Altman and Company Building.
Florida Memory or the Florida Memory Program is an LSTA-funded internet-based digital outreach program providing free online access to primary source materials including historical photographs, audio, video, and textual documents from collections housed in the State Library and Archives of Florida. The Florida Memory Program also produces educational content through educational materials, teacher's lesson plans, a Florida history blog, and online exhibits.
The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) is a collaboration between the Library of Congress and WGBH Educational Foundation, founded through the efforts of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The AAPB is a national effort to digitally preserve and make accessible historically significant public radio and television programs created over the past 70+ years. The archive comprises over 120 collections from contributing stations and original producers from US states and territories. As of April 2020, the collection includes nearly 113,000 digitized items preserved on-site at the Library of Congress, and 53,000 items in the collection are streaming online in the AAPB Online Reading Room.
The Hogan Archive of New Orleans Music and New Orleans Jazz is located in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States, and is one of the special collections of the Tulane University library. The archive specializes in Dixieland Jazz, gospel, blues, rhythm and blues, Creole songs, and related musical genres. Its collection includes: Oral histories, audio and video recordings, photos and other images, sheet music, personal papers, and teaching aids.
