Houston Public Library Launches Oral History Site

Mayor, city council, fund new histories, digital conversion of library histories

Lynn Blumenstein -- Library Journal, 10/02/2009

• Older HPL histories digitized
• Local university historians add expertise
• Libraries uphold long tradition in oral history

Houston Public Library (HPL) is a pivotal partner in an ambitious oral history project, a multiyear, collaborative effort to that will help preserve important parts of the city’s history through the voices of its inhabitants.

The Houston Oral History Project (HOHP), a site that launched September 29, already offers many digitized oral histories for viewing and listening, categorized into three sections.

Three collections span decades
The Mayor Bill White Collection (MBWC) consists of 100 new interviews of local community leaders and witnesses to local history. Historians from the University of Houston (UH), Texas Southern University, and Rice University were involved in the project. These interviews are also available at HPL and UH.

The Neighborhood Voice collection includes 56 video interviews that HPL conducted during the summer of 2008. HPL invited citizens to visit libraries throughout the city to record their recollections about living in Houston.

The HMRC Oral Histories are digitized versions of HPL’s Houston Metropolitan Research Center oral histories conducted in the 1970s and 1980s. The digital conversion process is ongoing, with more than 240 interviews already transcribed and approximately 300 additional hours to be digitized over the next year.

Collaborative effort
The HOHP is a collaborative effort among the City of Houston, HPL, the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs, and UH, including Joe Pratt, UH chairman of history and Cullen Professor of History and Business.

The MBWC was funded with $275,000 in Library Special Revenue Funds secured by Mayor White and approved by the City Council. These funds also paid for digitization, transcripts, and the web site.

Digitization of the HMRC collection was funded by a TexTreasures grant secured from Library Services and Technology Act funding. The digitization conversion project received matching grants from the Friends of the Texas Room, the Houston Public Library Foundation Cullinen Endowment, and HOHP.

Libraries and oral history, longtime partners
Public libraries are no strangers to oral history efforts. They often began as repositories for locally printed matter and have evolved into managing more ambitious digitization efforts. Greenwich Public Library, CT, for example, has compiled local histories since 1973 and launched an ongoing digital presence in 2006.

More recently, several public libraries were sites in 2007-08 for the National Public Radio (NPR)/Library of Congress (LC) StoryCorps, which recorded the memories of everyday Americans for NPR broadcast and LC archives.

Big cities, big library efforts
Nashville Public Library has developed an online oral history collection on civil rights. An outgrowth of a special collection funded by local philanthropists in 2001, the collection contains a series of interviews done by library staff members and volunteers with people who were involved in the Nashville and national movement.

The New York Public Library is home to dozens of oral history projects, ranging from an AIDS Oral History Project including interviews with dancers in the 1980s, available by appointment, to an extensive collection of interviews addressing Louis Armstrong’s contribution to jazz.

In April of this year, Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Boston, received a $1 million gift from the family of Professor Allen Smith, some of which will bolster scholarships for LIS students with an interest in oral history.