UW—Madison Campus Voices: Past (Present & Future?)

To accompany the recent posting and success of U.S. Forest Products Lab (FPL) Centennial Oral History Project—a joint project between the UW—Madison Oral History Program (OHP) and the UW Digital Collections Center (DCC)—the two groups have joined forces again to put the first nine interviews from the OHP’s general oral history collection onto the DCC’s website. Under the project title, UW—Madison Campus Voices, the full audio interviews with the following OHP narrators, Kathryn Clarenbach, E. David Cronon (by himself and with John Jenkins), Donald Downs, Mark Ingraham, Cora Lee Kluge, Jack Mitchell, George Mosse, and William Sewell, can be accessed from any computer with internet access.

If interested in reviewing the FPL project, go to http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/FPLHist/. And if interested in seeing the Campus Voices’ content, go to http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/UW/subcollections/UWCampusVoicesAbout.html. Neither project could have happened without the efforts of OHP and DCC staffers, whose time, effort, and insight made these presentations possible.

Both of these web presentations (FPL & Campus Voices) serve as the beginning of a “beautiful friendship” between the OHP & DCC. Extant transcripts to the nine Voices interviews and sound & extant transcripts from the 1970s TAA Strike oral history project will be published to the DCC’s site in the near future.

As recordings from these project in particular and from most all interviews in general, the strength of oral history lies in people telling their stories. Those familiar with StoryCorps, know from listening to excerpts of interviews on National Public Radio that hearing someone tell their story can be greatly moving, and in many cases can have more impact than a typed rendition.
One of the continuing challenges of an oral history program is to give people easier access to the rich stories that have been collected over time.

The method of providing access to oral history needs to change to accommodate the requirements of today’s users. The key is to present the sometimes poignant stories, strong opinions, and heartfelt memories from the collection in short segments (snippets), and to offer these snippets in a technological format that allows for easier access. When users come across a story that peaks their interest, they can look to the content providers, such as the UW–Madison Archives, home of the OHP, or the DCC, to get into the story or subject in more depth.

In the next few months, the OHP & DCC, as well as other interested UW—Madison Libraries & campus folks, intend to move this discussion from conception to reality. So, look for more details on this idea in the future.