Grant Brings Oral Histories to the Web
A grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services will bring 500 oral histories to the library's Documenting the American South web site.
The $505,232 award, "Oral Histories of the American South," will fund the digitization and online delivery of audio recordings and transcripts collected by UNC's Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) and held in the Southern Historical Collection of UNC's Louis Round Wilson Library. The SOHP is the University Library's principal collaborative partner on the project, along with the Center for the Study of the American South, the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Education, and ibiblio, a conservancy of freely available information.
The more than 3,700 recordings in the Southern Oral History Program Collection are among the most frequently consulted items in the Southern Historical Collection said Tim West, curator of Manuscripts and director of the Southern Historical Collection. "Bringing the great collections of the Wilson Library directly to researchers, wherever they are, is a tremendous service."
A pilot project of 21 interviews was funded by the library and made available last year. The full project will focus particularly on interviews related to race and civil rights, women, Southern politics, the Southern economy and Charlotte as a geographic region of interest. Scholars from the SOHP will select the interviews to be digitized and posted.
In addition to providing direct access to valuable research materials, the project will feature new technology pioneered by the University Library to synchronize the voice of each storyteller with a scrolling print transcript
"This has been one of the great challenges facing the digitization community," said Natalia Smith, digitization librarian and the principal investigator for the grant. "Although well-developed technologies exist to deliver print and audio over the web, we don't know of anybody else who has successfully presented them simultaneously."
The technological advance provides exceptional benefit to scholars who rely on recorded oral histories, said Dr. Jacquelyn Hall, Julia Cherry Spruill professor of history at UNC and director of the Southern Oral History Program. Researchers need to search and consult printed transcripts, but, she said, "a transcript can't capture how the story is told." The grant project, she said, will "convey to people the power of the voices that are in this collection."
Another objective of the grant is to develop curriculum materials for K-12 teachers and students. Cheryl Mason Bolick, an assistant professor in the UNC School of Education, will develop lesson plans and learning objects that incorporate the primary source materials from "Oral Histories of the American South."
"This is going to be a great resource for teachers," said Bolick, citing the personal impact of the stories. The curriculum materials will be posted on the classroom page of "Documenting the American South" and on the School of Education's LEARN-North Carolina Web site.
"Voices of the American South" is one of ten Documenting the American South collections. Documenting the American South has grown steadily since it began in 1996. In April, it received the Electronic Lincoln Prize from Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, PA. Upcoming projects include a documentary history of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, historic maps and colonial and state records of North Carolina.
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