So you found a box of cassette tapes, and on the cover you see the words:
ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEWS
We are working to help organizations like yours all around our region.
If you feel daunted, even overwhelmed, by those boxes of cassette tapes in your collection, read about the project of the Sharon (Connecticut) Historical Society. They have followed a roadmap that brought them from a situation in which 1) they were not sure what was in those boxes of tapes, to 2) making those very interviews available online at the Connecticut Digital Archive.
There were many steps, approached one at a time.
The Oral History Center coordinated the effort, provided small grants for interns and consultants, and helped find people to do the work.
Now, we are working with Sheffield. The Sheffield Historical Society was part of the original four groups we worked with, and an inventory of their collection was completed. At the time, a Sheffield Land Trust member asked us to consider adding a collection of oral histories of farmers that they had in their collections.
Now, we have partnered with the Sheffield Historical Society and the Berkshire Athenaeum Local History Department, and we hired Kate Abbott, who will conduct the inventory and move through all the steps to get the stories digitally recorded/copied, metadata forms completed, and the rest of the work to get these oral histories properly archived. (Kate has worked with oral histories at Williams College.)
And so, our next step, Sept. 2023, is Sheffield farmers, and in the fall of 2023, we will also work with Kent Historical Society, on their collections.
How does this process work? This is what we did in Sharon.
First Step: Learn what you have. The inventory.
First, director Christine Beers hired two former SHS volunteers who inventoried the collection, which turned out to include 32 interviews on cassette tapes and a few microcassettes.
Doing an inventory takes the mystery of out the project, makes it a known thing. Not only that, the inventory helps you chart your progress. Learn what you have, and then plot out the next steps, always documenting your work for the person who might stumble onto it after you have moved on to another place.
Second: Digital copies and safe storage
Next, they hired an intern who came each week – even if only for a few hours – to work on making digital copies. This work is time consuming, and that is one reason the task gets put on the back burner. The intern, Cherise Hutchings, was dependable and interested in the project. We were thrilled to work with her, to support her work.
Third: Prepare for the archive
The next step was to prepare the digital copies for the archive. Sharon was the first of our collaborators to show us how it works with Connecticut Digital Archives. We also work with University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Special Collections and University Archives, and we are beginning to work with the Digital Commonwealth. Each archive has its own requirements. (Some archives request particular metadata information, transcriptions, file formats, etc.)
When one of our oral history collections shows up in a statewide archive, and online,
We celebrate!
Imagine, from boxes of unknown content to publicly available stories.
The stories people told are no longer hidden away in boxes.
(Or as the modern version of the same thing, on an old hard drive.)
We are working with four towns, Sharon, Kent, Salisbury, and Sheffield, Mass., each with a different situation regarding their oral history collections. This work is one of the main reasons behind the founding of the Oral History Center in 2016.
Thank you, Christine Beers, SHS Director, for shepherding the project.
And thanks to the Connecticut Digital Archives, too.