Oral History - guide to resources: I-N

The Institute of Contemporary British History (ICBH) has organised over 100 oral history ‘witness seminars’ since 1986. Witness seminars are group interviews that bring key participants to a particular event or policy together in front of an audience of expert academics and interested parties. The agreed transcripts from the majority of past seminars are now available to download from the site, along with expert introductions and additional background information. The past seminars are listed under five subject areas: Defence History, Diplomatic History, Economic History, Political History, and Science and Technology History. If a transcript is not yet currently available for download, please email Dr Michael Kandiah or Dr Virginia Preston.

Topics: Politics & Government; Science & Medicine; War & Conflict

Keywords: diplomacy; foreign policy; politics; science

From 2001 to 2002, the Irish Centre for Migration Studies at the National University of Ireland in Cork conducted 11 life narrative interviews with recent immigrants to Ireland. Traditionally a country of emigration, the economic boom during the 1990s encouraged a wave of immigration into Ireland in the latter years of the decade. This project sought to record the experiences of some of these immigrants within their individual and collective life stories. The complete audio recording of six interviews with individuals from Nigeria and the Phillipines are currently available to listen to online.

Topics: People

Keywords: migration; refugees

This oral history project established in 2006 recorded the stories and experiences of people from all over the world who came to settle in Reading. 22 interview transcripts are available to read online and extracts from the interviews can also be searched by selected themes, including Childhood, Children’s Identity, Community, Economic Situation, Education & Training, Family Values, Food, Jobs, Old Reading, Political Situation, Racism, Self Sufficiency, and Where Home Is.

Topics: People

Keywords: childhood; community; education; family; migration; race; refugees; work

[no longer freely available.] In the First Person is an in-depth index of thousands of collections of English language personal narratives from around the world. Along with diary entries and letters, the index contains approximately 17,00 entries for oral history. The index is searchable by keyword.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore; Arts & Culture; Education; People; Politics & Government; Science & Medicine; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: portal

The British Library has made available online 65 oral history interviews with Jewish survivors of the Holocaust living in Britain. The complete audio recordings and transcripts of the interviews are accessible to everyone through British Library Sounds. The interviews were collected as part of a much larger project on the Living Memory of the Jewish Community, which ran from 1988 to 2000.

Topics: People; War & Conflict

Keywords: Holocaust; Jews; race; Third Reich

This project, which resulted in a book publication, sought to explore the memories of the Jewish population in Leicester during the 1940s and 1950s. Six short audio extracts from interviews recorded at the project book launch are available to listen to online. It is also possible to download chapters of the book from the website.

Topics: People

Keywords: community; Jews

This project sought to produce a lasting record of the historic jobbing system, which first developed during the nineteenth-century and came to an end with the ‘Big Bang’ of October 1986. Firms of jobbers left few, if any, records of their affairs. The Centre for Metropolitan History has thus compiled an archive of 32 interviews with former jobbers, and a smaller number with brokers and financial journalists so as to provide a different perspective on the jobbing system. Summaries of all 42 interviews, and full transcripts and audio recordings for 32 interviews are available online. The ten interviews not available online may be consulted, by arrangement, at the Centre for Metropolitan History.

Topics: Work

Keywords: business history; finance

This project was established in 2005 at a reunion of the first ‘pioneer’ intake of students to the University in 1950. Students who attended the University from 1950 to 1972 have been interviewed about their memories of the University. Transcribed extracts from the interviews are available to read on the website.

Topics: Education

Keywords: students; university; education

Between 2004 and 2008, King’s Cross Voices captured the memories and experiences of a large variety of men and women who lived, worked and studied in King’s Cross before its physical landscape and communities became transformed by the redevelopment of the area. Oral history interviews were collected with those who worked in the railway industry, as well as with students, teachers, shopkeepers, market traders, police officers, artists, office workers, campaigners, squatters, politicians, prostitutes, factory workers, builders and many more. Written extracts from nine of the interviews are available to read online, as is an audio sound trail of Argyle Square in the King’s Cross area, which includes audio extracts from the original interviews. The recordings and transcripts are archived at Camden Local Studies and Archives Centre and are available to access in full on public computers in all Camden Libraries.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: community

In 2007 Kiveton Park and Wales History Society interviewed residents about their lives and experiences in the area. Audio extracts from 12 interviews are available to listen to online. Many of these relate to coal mining.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: childhood; education; football; mining; industry; sport; union; WWII

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Korean War, the Imperial War Museum created this site which includes 8 short audio extracts from interviews with Korean War veterans. The Sound Archive has been interviewing Korean War veterans since 1990 and the full audio interviews are available to listen to at the Imperial War Museum, London.

Topics: War & Conflict

Keywords: military history

This project conducted oral history interviews with people from Suffolk who had either taken part in the Olympic or Paralympic Games since 1948 or were then preparing to compete in London 2012. Short films, audio recordings and transcripts of 21 interviews are available to access through the website.

Topics: Arts & Culture

Keywords: sport

The Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture holds a large number of recordings relating to dialect and folk life dating back to the 1950s. There are recordings related to most English counties, as well as Scotland, Wales and Ireland. They cover a wide variety of subjects, including community, society, economics, industrial relations, politics, history, customs and beliefs, traditional medicine, traditional narratives, children's traditions, traditional music, song, dance and drama, as well as traditional crafts, work techniques and material culture. 16 audio extracts from the archives are available to listen to online. The online selection aims to be representative of the range of holdings available at the archive in Leeds.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore

Keywords: community; craft; dance; language; music; politics; songs

The Listening Project is an ongoing project run in partnership by the BBC and the British Library. The project has requested people from across the country to submit an audio recording of a short, meaningful conversation held between two individuals. The recordings are being broadcast across BBC radio and archived by the British Library. A significant number, currently over 300, are also available to listen to through the BBC Radio 4 website. The conversations cover a wide range of topics including education, family, health, religion and war.

Topics: Arts & Culture; Education; People; War & Culture; Work

Keywords: education; family; healthcare; religion; sexuality; sport

This project recorded the experiences of people in the UK living with haemophilia and HIV by means of life story interviews. Audio and transcript extracts from eight interviews with individuals with haemophilia and HIV are available online, as are seven interviews with members of their families. Extracts from the interviews have also been arranged into a number of browsable key themes.

Topics: People; Science & Medicine

Keywords: death; family; healthcare; medicine

This database of the digitised Mass Observation archive is available to University members. As well as providing online access to top level file reports produced by Mass Observation from 1937 to 1972, this resource also provides access to the raw data used to produce them for a series of topic collections, including Juvenile Delinquency; Korea, 1950; and Radio Listening, 1939-1948. This raw material consists of interviews as well as questionnaires, observations and ephemera. To access this resource from outside the Oxford University network, follow the link through SOLO.

Topics: Arts & Culture; People; Politics & Government; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: cinema; family; music; politics; radio; television

This website provides access to a number of videos created as part of a project to record stories of migration into the East Midlands from the UK and further afield since 1945. The project, which was managed by the East Midlands Oral History Archive, trained a number of local groups to conduct and edit the oral history interviews into a number of short videos about their communities. The videos can be accessed by clicking on an interactive map of the East Midlands area on the website homepage. It is worth noting that this map does not seem to load correctly when using Firefox web browser but works fine when using Internet Explorer.

Topics: People

Keywords: migration; refugees

The Millenium Memory Bank (MMB) represents one of the largest single oral history collections in Europe. From 1998 to 1999, BBC local radio stations interviewed a total of 640 individuals from around the UK about their local, everyday experiences. These formed the basis for a series of radio programmes entitled The Century Speaks. Interviewees ranged in age from five to 107 years olds and were drawn from a variety of ethnic and socio-economic backgrounds. British Library Sounds has made 395 audio extracts from these interviews available for anyone to listen to online. Each audio extract is accompanied by a linguistic description of the item. The interviews are geographically browsable by county and within this by town.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: agriculture; community; environment; family; language; work

This website provides online access to ten extracts from oral history interviews recorded between 2001 and 2008 about life and work on Dartmoor. The complete recordings have been fully transcribed and archived in full onto CDs, which can be listened to at the Dartmoor National Park Authority’s High Moorland Visitor Centre in Princetown, and various other information centres, museums and libraries throughout Dartmoor. They are also available for sale through the website’s online shop.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: agriculture; community; housing; industry; tourism; WWII

This project, also known as Fatherless Families, explored the lives and experiences of mothers living alone through a series of oral history interviews. It sought to examine both the detailed indicators and the subjective experience of poverty, as well as the problems faced by families as a consequence of both low incomes and lack of fathers. Topics covered in the interviews included housing conditions, living arrangements, marriage, factors that led to fatherlessness, family structure, work, health, diet, clothing and education. 119 interview transcripts (composed after the event) are available to download through the UK data service. To access the material, it is first necessary to sign into the UK data service using your institutional login.

Topics: People

Keywords: community; gender; housing; women; poverty

This study examined health history, beliefs and attitudes to health and medical care, inter-generational relationships and social history with members of a grandmother generation. The transcripts of 46 oral history interviews conducted with grandmothers from 1977 to 1978 are accessible online. The transcripts have all been converted by OCR from paper to searchable Word and .rtf format. In order to download the interviews it is first necessary to sign into the UK data service using your institutional login.

Topics: People; Science & Medicine

Keywords: family; healthcare

Amongst other sources related to the history of the area, this website provides online access to approximately 150 complete audio recordings held by the East Midlands Oral History Archive (EMOHA). The interviews primarily relate to life in Leicestershire from the turn of the century to the 1930s and cover a wide variety of topics from WWI to influenza, education and work. A number of recordings also relate to the interviewees experiences abroad, particularly in India. The interviews are all summarised and categorised and available to search by keyword.

Topics: Arts & Culture; Education; People; Politics & Government; Science & Medicine; War & Conflict; Work

Keywords: agriculture; community; engineering; family; religion; WW1

The National Folklore collection consists of thousands of hours of audio recordings of Irish folklore, folk narrative, music, song, custom, belief and oral history. A number of short audio recordings have been made available to listen to online.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore

Keywords: customs; folktales; music; songs

Extensive summaries of a number of oral history interviews from the British Library Sound Archive’s ‘Leaders of National Life’ Collection are available through their online catalogue (catalogue reference number: C408) The collection covers politics, industry, the arts, sports, religion, the professions, administration and communications. The audio recordings of these interviews, along with many more items from the British Library’s National Life Stories collections, are available to listen to in full at the British Library, St Pancras.

Topics: Arts & Culture; Politics & Government; Work

Keywords: industry; politics; religion; sports