Oral History Online

ROHO Oral History Transcripts in the Online Archive of California
Many ROHO oral history transcripts are now available in the Online Archive of California (OAC), an initiative of the California Digital Library (CDL). They are currently broken down by the following categories:

Agriculture
The Arts
California Government and Politics
California Society and Family Life
California Wine Industry
Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement
The Earl Warren Oral History Project
Free Speech Movement Includes both ROHO and non-ROHO oral histories.
Jewish Community Leaders in the Bay Area
Medicine, Science, Biotechnology and Public Health
Natural Resources and the Environment
The Suffragists Oral History Project
The University History Series
University of California Black Alumni Series
Western Mining in the Twentieth Century

There are also a number of oral history transcripts available in PDF form in the Project and Subject Area pages.


About the ROHO/OAC Project

With increasing academic and public interest in first-hand accounts and personal perspectives on historical events, oral histories are a natural addition to the Bancroft Library's pioneering work in on-line access to collections. The Bancroft has been a national leader in digital library initiatives, first by converting its card catalog, then as the lead institution in putting finding aids, or guides to collections, on line (now in the Online Archive of California), and as the implementor of the California Heritage Digital Images Access Project. In the California Heritage project archival objects, in this case collections of photographs, were linked directly to finding aids. Two of the many finding aids in the OAC are the catalogs of the Regional Oral History Office. Wouldn't it be wonderful if researchers could discover an oral history by searching in the finding aids collection, or even in our online catalog, and then go directly to the full text of the item -- the oral history -- itself? This project seeks to achieve that end.

The transcripts are marked up in SGML using the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI). Our choice of the TEI was a natural one. The TEI was developed for the encoding of humanities texts, and has all the features necessary for marking up oral history transcripts. Mark up entails inserting into the text of the oral histories the codes or tags (invisible to the user) that allow for complex searching of the entire transcript. Currently, we are experimenting with subject access within the transcripts (no simple matter, since the oral histories were indexed with a wide variety of terminology, not based in any way upon standard vocabularies) and regularization of personal and corporate names within the markup. Along with the transcripts themselves, photos, prefaces, contents pages and in some cases, appendices, are included, so that the distant reader has full access to the complete volumes of the oral histories.