Preserving our Past For a Better Tomorrow
Check out the resources below for more information on preserving an oral history.
Choose an Outlet
The internet offers vast options for uploading, storing, and sharing your stories with the world.
Document and Preserve It
Use Your Technology
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Cell Phones
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Tablets
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Webcams
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Laptops
Old Photos
Family Stories
Local
Histories
Parents
Grandparents
Find The History Around You
RECORD
We have the tools and technologies literally at our fingertips to document and preserve these stories. Mobile devices make it easy to record audio and video, and the internet offers numerous options for uploading, saving, and sharing files.
RECOVER
It's great to know the main facts and dates of history, but it's just as important to understand how those facts and dates affected towns and families and individuals. Those things are only discovered in the memories and stories of those who actually experienced them.
RETELL
Whether its through novels, blog posts, YouTube, Facebook or any number of other options that today's technologies present, we have the ability like no other time in history to spread these stories to the world. Not just to expose a new generation, but to preserve them for all generations to come.
National Trust for Historic Preservation
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a privately funded nonprofit organization, is leading the movement to save places where our history happened.
Oral History in the Digital Age
Oral history is in a profound transition, from an extensive period when sophisticated technology meant utilizing tape cassettes to a time when the field has moved into the digital, networked, multi-media rich age. The transition into a digital world and the flexibility it brings has changed the cost of recording oral history, standards of practice and scholarship, and the vehicles for access.
Resulting issues are deeply complex and often dynamic. Digital video is now readily affordable, but the field remains deeply divided over its use and role. Equally important, the digital age makes widespread access and use of both audio and video oral narratives, as well as transcripts, increasingly affordable, but it also highlights major questions about intellectual property rights and informed consent. The role of transcription, typically a staple in oral history, is now being reexamined given the new technologies for studying and accessing digital oral histories.
The Oral History Association
The Oral History Association, established in 1966, seeks to bring together all persons interested in oral history as a way of collecting and interpreting human memories to foster knowledge and human dignity. With an international membership, the OHA serves a broad and diverse audience. Local historians, librarians and archivists, students, journalists, teachers, and academic scholars from many fields have found that the OHA provides both professional guidance and a collegial environment for sharing research.
