Community Archiving Strategies for Oral History

ALA and ALCTS are committed to supporting our members, staff, and all librarians and library workers during these uncertain times. We will continue to offer online learning opportunities, and will do our best to accommodate the remote needs of our attendees. We will also continue to offer group registration, providing individual logins for each group member registered for ALCTS webinars. Please contact ALCTS with any questions or concerns.

This webinar was presented on April 29, 2020. Access the recording and materials now:

• Webinar Recording
• YouTube Video
• Presentation Slides

Oral History within the context of Community Archiving: In our setting at Queens Public Library, we’ve found that it helps to have events like story sharing circles to engage and empower communities to participate in oral history work. Public programs on local history help us identify good candidates to sit for full (1-2 hour-long) oral history interviews with our interviewers. We have worked out some tried and true models for these public programs that I will discuss as a way to engage a community you’d like to organize an oral history project with. It’s always been important within the Queens Memory context to not just be focused on collecting for our archives, but also spend time with community members helping them build the skills they need to interview the elders in their lives, preserve the artifacts in their own families, and generally see themselves as part of history.