Building oral history collections through collaborations between archives and scholars

Learn about the potential for partnering with scholars and experts to build collections of oral history interviews to be made available for research. AUC’s experience in providing logistical support for collaborative oral history projects, along with acquiring and providing digital access to donations of interviews from scholars, will be shared.

This presentation will demonstrate how the AUC Archives has partnered with academics and expert scholars in various fields to build oral history collections, and help attendees of the session learn how they can use similar strategies to develop collections for use by students, faculty, and other researchers via digital platforms. One strategy to be covered is partnering with an expert or project focused on a particular topic, by combining their subject knowledge and contacts with training (or trained staff), equipment, description expertise, and digital platforms provided by the archives, to build an oral history collection centered on a particular population of interviewees. AUC Archives’ experience with an oral history project with relocated villagers near Luxor, Egypt (a collaboration with a local documentarian) and a grant project for interviewing Egyptian Islamists (a partnership with an AUC law research unit) will be described, and recommendations and lessons learned offered. Another strategy to be addressed is arranging with scholars for the donation of oral histories those experts conducted, which would be described and housed by the archives. AUC’s experiences with building collections in this way (about the Egyptian 2011 revolution, the country’s Jewish community, and neighborhood life in Cairo) will also be outlined.