The Digital Community Collections Project is generously funded by the Mellon Foundation as an initiative to connect more people in the Pittsburgh community with the resources of CLP's Recollection Studio. Read on to find out how you can attend Community Scan Days and be a part of CLP’s online community archive.
Scan your old photographs, documents, slides, and more for free at Community Scan Day!
Scan your old photographs, documents, slides, and more for free at Community Scan Day!
Scan your old photographs, documents, slides, and more for free at Community Scan Day!
Learn how to safely download and organize your data in this workshop.
can your old photographs, documents, slides, and more for free at Community Scan Day!
Scan your old photographs, documents, slides, and more for free at Community Scan Day!
Scan your old photographs, documents, slides, and more for free at Community Scan Day!
Join genealogy societies and libraries from Western Pennsylvania for help with your research and information about their collections.
Scan your old photographs, documents, slides, and more for free at Community Scan Day!
Scan your old photographs, documents, slides, and more for free at Community Scan Day!
Scan your old photographs, documents, slides, and more for free at Community Scan Day!
Scan your old photographs, documents, slides, and more for free at Community Scan Day!
Scan your old photographs, documents, slides, and more for free at Community Scan Days!
Scan your old photographs, documents, slides, and more for free at Community Scan Day!
Scan your old photographs, documents, slides, and more for free at Community Scan Day! Staff will teach you how to use a portable scanner to digitize your items at CLP locations. If you’d like to donate digital copies to the CLP Digital Community Collection, a staff member will walk you through the donation process.
Appointments are 40 minutes long, with a limit of 10 items. You must bring your own storage for your scans, such as a flash drive or portable hard drive.
Acceptable items (no larger than 8.5” x 11.7”) include:
To find the next event at your neighborhood location, please visit our events page.
Want to host a Community Scan Day at your community event, local senior center, or other location outside of the library?
Request an Outside the Library Experience! Community members will be able to scan their local & family history items with the help of a CLP staff member. Visit our Library Experiences page to find out more and request an event.
The items you digitize could help tell untold Pittsburgh stories through CLP’s Digital Community Collection. CLP is looking for donations of digital files of your photos, documents, and videos depicting life in Pittsburgh throughout history. Cultural traditions, neighborhood streets, and community events are just a few examples of everyday photographs that would be a great fit in our Digital Community Collection.
This community archive will be accessible online, where researchers, neighbors, and the community can learn about Pittsburgh’s past thanks to you.
Have items you’d like to share? The library will accept the following formats:
MP4 for video
JPEG or TIFF for images
WAV or MP3 for audio
PDF for text documents
Oral history projects are a great way to capture stories from our past and present. It may feel overwhelming now, but you can record oral history interviews yourself with items you have at home or items available through the library.
This guide walks you through oral history basics with the help of resources from expert historians, libraries, and institutions.
Click on the tabs above to see content on specific oral history topics.
When creating oral history projects, there are responsibilities and guiding principles that all oral historians should follow. No matter how small the project may be, ethically conducting interviews and being up front with participants is essential. The Oral History Association has created Principles & Best Practices and Social Justice Guidelines to help guide beginners and seasoned oral historians alike. Click on the links below to read the full document before you begin planning your oral history project.
Plan, plan, plan!
The OHA outlines all the pre-planning you should do before you hit record on your first interview. The more you anticipate before you begin interviews, the clearer your goals, interview questions, and end product will be. Oral histories are not recording phone conversations, recording someone without their consent, or recording lectures and speeches. An oral history interview should never be last minute or on the fly, because you should always be planning for that interview ahead of time.
Ethics are a fundamental responsibility
In that planning you do, you should be able to relay all of your goals, a clear picture of what the interview will look like, and how you anticipate using your interviews. This isn't just to help you as a project creator, but it is your responsibility to inform anyone you interview of this information before they agree to being recorded in any fashion.
Ethical concerns in oral history projects involve privacy, copyright, and trust. Before an interview starts, you need to get written informed consent from a participant stating they know all potential risks, uses, and the kinds of questions they will be asked in an interview. This protects the participant from being taken advantage of and protects the oral historian from any legal ramifications once the interview is over.
Social justice in oral history
The power dynamics inherent to an oral history project create an imbalance of power between the oral historian and the interviewees. Oral historians traditionally have power over who is interviewed, what questions are asked, and how their interviews are used later on. Many oral history projects aim to give voice to vulnerable communities, because that is something oral histories have the power to do. However, only using vulnerable communities for their interviews and not allowing them any say in the project, is not truly giving them a voice.
The OHA developed a Social Justice Task Force in 2019 to create better foundations for more collaborative oral history projects that have social justice values in mind. These guidelines better protect the most vulnerable of participants, but they also make the process more collaborative over all for all interviewees. It may seem daunting to allow flexibility over a project you plan, but involving your participants in the planning, goals, recruiting, and interviewing can make the project more successful. More people will feel proud of the project and their hand in it, making it sustainable piece of history for an entire community.
Before beginning to plan, take a look at both of the guidelines linked below.
If you aren't sure what an oral history project would look like for you, check out some examples for inspiration.
Veteran’s History Project from the Library of Congress American Folklife Center
This project documents the first-hand accounts of Americans who served in the U.S. Military since World War I. The collection features over 92,000 video and audio recordings available online. The Library of Congress has also grouped interviews by theme in the Serving: Our Voices section, curating a diverse but cohesive narrative of famous military events like the Battle of the Bulge.
Oral History of Monroeville, PA from Monroeville Historical Society
In the 1980s, Monroeville Historical Society interviewed twelve area citizens to track how life had changed in and around Monroeville. The project captured decades of history compiled into thematic chapters to read through. This community project shows how much history even just a small portion of the population can document. The original audio recordings have not been shared with the public, but the transcriptions have. So, the limitations around use of oral histories can be changed for your project.
The Only Plane in the Sky: An Oral History of 9/11 by Garret M. Graff
This 2019 book released transcripts of oral histories and declassified documents related to the events on September 11, 2001. What unfolded that day is chronicled minute-by-minute through hundreds of different perspectives. Oral histories can be a powerful way of breaking down a large scale event in history and making the stories personal. The audiobook version even has the interviewees reading transcripts from their original interviews.
Edie: American Girl by Jean Stein
This book and the oral history interviews behind it focus on one person rather than an event, community, or time period. Oral History projects can focus the questions around a single person while getting perspectives from various different people in their life. Edie Sedgwick was a model and actress, and by telling the story of her life, the oral history interviews captured much more about the 1960s.
The below forms and documents are examples of documentation you need for your oral history project. We suggest reading through the entire document and editing to fit your specific project before using these forms.
The library cannot recommend specific products or retailers for your oral history equipment but below are a few considerations for you to consider when finding audio & video technology for your project.
Use What You Have
If you have a smartphone, you will likely already have a way to record your interview. There are options for higher quality audio or video, but if you are looking for the most basic and low-cost option, you probably already own it.
Apple and Android devices have voice recording apps for free. These are simple to use, and you can share your audio files from your phone via text, email, or uploading them to cloud storage. Check your app store for the free audio recording apps. If you'd like to enhance the audio quality from recordings on your phone, you can purchase wireless mics that can connect to your phone.
Your smartphone or mobile device can also record video through camera apps already loaded on your device. The video quality on some phones is comparable to digital cameras.
Audio Recording Suggestions
If you are looking to have more advanced audio recording, you may want to purchase a portable audio recorder. These devices record audio into a digital file just like your phone would, but at a higher quality. They can sometimes reduce outside noise and record in two directions. Here are some qualities you might want to look for when purchasing audio recording devices:
Video Recording Suggestions
Recording video as well as audio adds another level of complexity. The audio quality and recording discussed above should still be a priority even with a video recorded interview. There are added benefits to having a video recorded of an oral history interview. Seeing the interviewee while they talk can give added information to those who watch the interview in the future. However, know that it will be an added complication and ensure that you have the capacity.
Your video recording set up should have your camera, tripod, extra storage cards, and whatever you need to ensure your device has power (either the cords to recharge the battery or cords to plug the camera into a power source). There is a plethora of camera options out there, but here are a few considerations for a good oral history camera:
It is common practice to transcribe oral histories once the interview has been completed. To transcribe an interview is to listen to the recording and create a written representation of the interview, which looks a lot like a script. Transcriptions allow for the interviews to be more accessible and preserved in multiple formats.
Transcriptions are mostly unedited to best reflect the way the interviewee actually spoke. Having a person transcribe the interview is the best way to ensure there are minimal mistakes and the important details like places, people, and local slang are correctly recorded. The act of transcribing an interview takes much longer than the interview itself. On average, an hour of audio recording can take between four and six hours to transcribe. The interviewer does not need to be the one to transcribe the interview, but it helps since they know the context of the conversation the best.
Transcription Style Guide
Transcriptions can vary slightly between projects, but they tend to follow a common style guide. Transcripts look like a script, indicating who is speaking, when an interview is interrupted, and any other information that you would gather from the original audio recording.
Each project should have their own transcribing rules so that there is a cohesive and consistent style between transcripts. It may seem trivial, but it helps future readers tremendously.
Some rules you'll need to decide on include:
These rules are up to the project creator, but they must be consistent across all transcripts.
There are several oral history transcription style guides available for inspiration. Check out some of them below, but don't be afraid to modify them for your project.
Virginia Tech Oral History Transcript Formatting Guide
Virginia tech Oral History Transcript Style Guide
Baylor University Institute for Oral History Transcribing Oral History Guide
Columbia University Center for Oral History Research Oral History Transcription Style Guide
Automated Transcribing Services
If you are against transcribing interviews yourself or want to speed up the process, you can explore automated transcribing services online. Most of these services cost money and are not worth it for small projects. There are a couple of free options:
*Automated transcription is convenient, but it should always be used as a first pass at an interview. They are 95% accurate at best and have a hard time recognizing specific names, locations, and slang, all essential parts of an oral history interview.
However you decide to transcribe, always have another person edit and proofread your transcript before publishing or making available to readers.
Check back for more information on technology the library has to offer oral history projects soon!
Copyright - “The exclusive legal right to reproduce, publish, sell, or distribute the matter and form of something (such as a literary, musical, or artistic work). An agreement that documents, verbally or in writing, that the narrator has been given all the information necessary to come to a decision about whether to participate in the oral history project.” (OHA)
Deed of gift - “A deed of gift agreement defines how the narrator would like materials or rights related to an oral history to be managed as a donated collection—that is, transferred to an assigned party, such as the project director or a partnering/sponsoring organization or archive.” (OHA)
Formal agreement - Participating in an oral history interview may involve signing specific types of agreements or assigning intellectual property rights. (OHA)
Informed consent - “An agreement that documents, verbally or in writing, that the narrator has been given all the information necessary to come to a decision about whether to participate in the oral history project. Informed consent does not cover or deal with copyright.” (OHA)
Metadata - Information about aspects of an oral history interview, such as location and date of the interview.
MP3 file – a compressed audio file format. Most audio recordings from your phone are automatically set to this to save storage space.
Oral history - "Oral History collects memories and personal commentaries of historical significance through recorded interviews." - Donald Ritchie in Doing Oral History
Transcription – a written representation of an oral history interview, written after the interview has been recorded.
WAV file – an uncompressed audio file format.
