Oral history: links

Oral history in the UK and Ireland

Key organisations and major archives

• Oral History Society (UK) promotes the collection, preservation and use of recorded memories of the past.  The OHS provides advice on all aspects relating to oral history projects and offers a number of training programmes.  Information about the history of oral history is available at The making of oral history website.
• Archives & Records Association Section for Film, Sound and Photography
• British Universities Film and Video Council
• Imperial War Museum Sound Archive, London
• Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex
• Oral history collection of the Museum of Welsh Life, St Fagans, Cardiff.
• North West Sound Archive was founded to record, collect and preserve sound recordings relevant to life in the North West of England and includes internationally important collections including the survey of English dialect and solidarity speeches from the Dockyards of Poland. It is the largest collection of sound recordings outside London.
• Panos and Panos London Life Stories (including Mountain voices - oral history of people who live in mountainous regions around the world)
• School of Scottish Studies Sound Archive includes Gaelic and linguistic surveys and oral history recordings from many parts of Scotland.
• Scottish Life Archive
• Scottish Oral History Centre
• Ulster Folk and Transport Museum, Belfast (collections include the Sound Archive, Ulster Dialects & Linguistic Diversity Archive and the Living Linen Archive)

Regional and local archives and projects

• Age Exchange, The Reminiscence Centre
• Ambleside Oral History Group, Cumbria
• Archives of Cultural Tradition (formerly located in the National Centre for English Cultural Tradition), University of Sheffield
• Ayrshire Sound Archive, University of the West of Scotland
• Bradford Libraries, Archives & Information Service: Destination Bradford
• Centre for Visual and Oral History Research (COHR), Huddersfield
• Charles Parker Archive at Birmingham City Archive and the Connecting Histories project
• Dartmoor National Park Oral History
• East Midlands Oral History Archive
• Epping Forest District Museums Oral History Collection
• Exmoor Oral History Archive, Somerset.
• Fitzwilliam Oral History Project, Yorkshire
• Glasgow Museums (Museum of Transport) Oral History Project, Glasgow.
• Kensington and Chelsea Community History Group
• King's Cross Voices Oral History Project
• Kirklees Sound Archive, Huddersfield
• The Living Archive Project, Milton Keynes
• The Living Memory Association, Edinburgh
• Miners Voices
• Moroccan Memories in Britain
• Museum of London, London's Voices
• Norfolk Record Office Norfolk Sound Archive
• Northside Folklore Project - records the traditions of the Northside Community in Cork City, Ireland.
• Nottingham Central Library Oral History collections
• Orkney Sound Archive
• Oxfordshire’s Oral History Archive
• The People’s Story, Edinburgh
• Refugee Communities History Project
• Royal Naval Museum oral history collections and Sea Your History
• South Wales Coalfield Collection at the South Wales Miners’ Library
• Speaking for Ourselves Scope Oral History Project
• Sussex University HIV/Haemophiliac Life History Project
• University of Sheffield Hospice History Project promotes academic study into hospices and palliative care.
• Vietnamese Oral History project (Refugee Action)
• Waltham Forest Oral History Workshop
• Wessex Film and Sound Archive
• Wild Rose Heritage and Arts
• The National Lottery funded WRVS Heritage Plus project celebrates and records people’s individual and community histories. Individuals are able to submit their own memories and photographs to the website through the Memory Wall community history website

Oral history in the United States

• Center for Oral History at the University of Hawaii
• Civil Rights Oral History Project
• Densho: The Japanese American Legacy Project – an organisation using digital technology to preserve and make accessible video oral histories alongside historical images and teacher resources.
• Indiana University Oral History Research Center
• Miller Center of Public Affairs
• New Deal Network - an educational guide to the Great Depression of the 1930s.
• Oral History Association (US)
• Oral History Research Office Columbia University, New York
• Regional Oral History Office, Berkeley University, San Francisco Bay Area, California.
• Rhode Islanders' Oral History of 1968
• Southern Oral History Program, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Studs Terkel's 'Conversations with America'
• The National Gallery of the Spoken Word - collections of the 20th century
• The University of Louisville Oral History Center
• University of Nevada Oral History Programme
• The Vermont Folklife Center
• University of Alaska Fairbanks Oral History Program
• University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Oral History Research
• Voices of the Colorado Plateau
• US Library of Congress American Memory from the Library of Congress - history and culture of United States.
• US Library of Congress Voices from the Days of Slavery
• US Library of Congress WPA Federal Writers' Project Life Stories
• Utah State University Oral History Program

Oral history in the rest of the world

• International Oral History Association
• H-Oralhist is an international network for scholars and professionals active in studies related to oral history.
• In the First Person and Oral History Online, online indexes of over 4000 oral history collections in English from all over the world, assembled by Alexander Street Press [US]

North America

• Centre for Oral History & Digital Storytelling, Concordia University
• Canadian Oral History Association
• Oral History Association (US)

Australasia

• Assisted immigration from Britain to New Zealand
• Australian National University Centre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies
• Australia's Oral History Collections: a National Directory
• Oral History at the State Library of Western Australia
• Kilbirne-Lyall Bay Community Centre Oral History Project
• National Library of Australia Oral History Collection
• National Library of New Zealand Oral History Centre
• National Oral History Association of New Zealand
• New Zealand History Online (War Oral History programme)
• New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage History Group
• Oral History Association of Australia
• University of New South Wales Oral History Programme

Latin America

• Mexican Oral History Association, c/o Direccion de Estudios Historicos, Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, Apartado Postal 5-119, Mexico D.F.06500, email: smithers@servidor.unam.mx
• Museum of the Person, Sao Paulo, Brazil
• Oral History (Uruguay), c/o History Department, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educacion, Universidad de la Republica, Magallanes 1577, Montevideo, Uruguay, Fax: 598-2-484303.
• Instituto Historico de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (Argentina)

West Indies / Caribbean

• Cayman Islands Oral History Programme, The Cayman Islands National Archive, Government Administration Building, George Town, Grand Cayman, British West Indies, Fax: 345-949-9727.
• Social History Project (Jamaica), University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica
• Folk Research Centre (St Lucia)
• Oral History Project (Barbados), University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados
• National Oral History Programme (Barbados), National Cultural Foundation, West Terrace, St James, Barbados
• Oral and Pictorial Records Programme (Trinidad), The Main Library, University of West Indies, St Augustine, Trinidad

Asia

• Brunei History Centre
• Hong Kong Oral History Archives Project
• Japan Oral History Association, Inage-ku, Yaoi-cho 1 – 33, Chiba-shi, Chiba-ken, Japan
• National Archives of Singapore, Collection of Oral History Recording Database
• Society of Oral History on Modern China
• Oral History (Sabah), Sabah State Archives, Bag 2017, 88999 Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia, Fax: 225803.

Europe

• Malta Oral History Society, 15/16 Triq I-Imnajqar, Birkirkara, 9 Triq J. Pace, Bormla, Malta.
• Oral History Association of Russia, c/o History Department, Kirov State Medical Institute, 137 Karl Marx Street, Kirov 610602, Russia.
• Institute für Geschichte und Biographie / Institute for History and Biography (Germany)
• Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (KITLV) / Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (Netherlands)
• Italian Oral History Institute
• Oral History Center, St Petersburg (Russia)
• WebCT Oral History Research in the Nordic-Baltic Area (Estonia), Department of Estonian and Comparative Folklore, University of Tartu, Estonia

Africa

• Centre for Popular Memory (CPM), University of Cape Town, South Africa
• International Society for Oral Literature in Africa
• Oral History Archive (Zimbabwe), National Archives of Zimbabwe, Private Bag 7729, Causeway, Harare, Zimbabwe.
• South African History Online
• National Archives and Records Service of South Africa
• Sinomlando Centre for Oral History and Memory-Work, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal
• Western Cape Oral History Project, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Holocaust oral history

• Holocaust Memorial Day
• British Library Voices of the Holocaust
• Remember preserves memories of the Holocaust through art, discussion, photographs and poems.
• Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, Jerusalem, Israel.
• Videotaped interviews with survivors and witnesses from Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University.
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington.
• USC Shoah Foundation Institute

Equipment and preservation

• 4 Docs and BBC Training offer online training packages about using video for interviews
• The British Library Endangered Archives Programme has advice on video, film and audio preservation.
• International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archivists
• Safeguarding the Audio Heritage: Ethics, Principles and Preservation Strategy (web edition)
• Vermont Folklife Center Digital Audio Fieldwork Equipment Guide

Academic resources

• Archive material on daily life in Britain from Mass Observation investigations 1937 to early 1950s.
• Around 1968: Activists, Networks and Trajectories, an international project based in Oxford’s Modern European History Research Centre, reconsiders 1968 as a historic moment between postwar austerity and the Thatcher-Reagan years.  The project involves a team of historians examining samples of activist networks in fourteen European countries, in order to understand ways of becoming an activist, being an activist and making sense of activism compares.  A database of interviews with 1968 activists in 14 European countries is available to registered researchers.
• British Library link to resources for researching Women's Studies.
• British National Corpus includes a collection of writings and recordings used for linguistic analysis.
• Caribbean Studies and the history of Black and Asian peoples in the UK
• Genesis women's history initiative
• HistoricalVoices.org aims to create a fully searchable online database of spoken word collections.
• History Matters - gateway to web resources for teachers of history in US schools and colleges.
• International Dialects of English Archive, University of Kansas.
• National Electronic and Video Archive of the Crafts (NEVAC) at at the University of the West of England, Bristol.
• 'Oral History' a downloadable book by Graham Smith, published by History at the HEA and the IHR, about using oral history in higher education.
• Qualidata provides social science qualitative research data and useful guidance on ethics.
• Smithsonian Institution Research Information System
• The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia
• University of London Institute of Historical Research
• University of Sussex Centre for Life History Research and Teaching

General interest resources

• In-depth articles, multimedia, short biographies and history listings for BBC TV and Radio
• Local History magazine
• The History Channel
• History Today Magazine
• The Society for Folk Life Studies

Further information

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