The Regional Oral History Office is a research program of the University of California, Berkeley, working within The Bancroft Library.
ROHO conducts, teaches, analyzes, and archives oral and video history documents in a broad variety of subject areas critical to the history of California and the United States.
ROHO provides a forum for students and scholars working with oral sources to deepen the quality of their research and to engage with the theory, methodology, and meaning of individual testimony and social memory.
As a division of The Bancroft Library, the Regional
Oral History Office preserves the history of the San Francisco
Bay Area, California, and the Western United States. By conducting
carefully researched, tape-recorded, and transcribed interviews,
ROHO creates archival oral histories intended for the widest
possible use.
Since its inception in 1954, ROHO has carried
out interviews in a variety of major subject areas, including
politics and government, law and jurisprudence, arts and letters,
business and labor, social and community history, University
of California history, natural resources and the environment,
and science and technology. Individual interviews have
been used as source material for monographs, books, articles,
video and film documentaries, and dissertations.
Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting
from each participant a full and accurate account of events.
The interviews are transcribed, lightly edited for accuracy and
clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees, who are encouraged
to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected
transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs
and illustrative materials. Archival copies are placed in The
Bancroft
Library, with the sponsoring agency, if any, and at UCLA. Copies are made available
at cost to other manuscript libraries. The Bancroft Library also houses the
original tapes so researchers can gain a sense of the
interviewee's voice and intonations.
ROHO's volumes are deposited in more than 700
manuscript libraries worldwide and catalogued on two nationally
accessible library data bases, RLIN [Research Libraries Information
Network] and OCLC, and on Melvyl and OskiCat, the
University of California's on-line catalogs.
Oral history at The Bancroft Library had its
beginnings in the work of the historian of the West for whom
the library is named, Hubert Howe Bancroft. Bancroft recognized
that missing from his vast collection of books,
journals, maps, and manuscripts on western North America were the living memories
of many of the participants in the development of California and the West.
In the 1860s he launched an ambitious project to interview and create autobiographies
of a diverse group of pioneer Westerners and the resulting volumes of "Dictations "continue
to provide valuable primary source for historians.
