Oral History - guide to resources: I-N

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

Features stories that offer an insight into people’s experiences of conflict, from the First World War to the present day, some of which include selections from oral history recordings (Cf. for instances 'Afghanistan and the British Military', 'Voices of the First World War: Gallipoli', or 'Listen To RAF Pilots Tell The Story Of The Battle Of Britain'). To search the whole sound archive, the majority of which has been digitised, instead go to: https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/sound .

Topics: War & Conflict

Keywords: military history; First World War; Second World War; War in Afghanistan

This collection includes 42 oral history interviews focused on the working lives of women (1930-1960) living in three counties of Ireland (Cork, Kerry and Limerick). The project was part of an interdisciplinary research initiative entitled 'Women and Irish Society: Understanding the Past and Present Through Archives and Social Research'. Launched in February 2000, it sought to illuminate the transformation of women's lives in Irish society over time and place, through sociological, literary and applied social research.

Topics: People; Work

Keywords: Women; Ireland; Work

[Remote access unavailable as an ongoing consequence of the 2023 British Library cyberattack - please refer to the interim Sound and Moving Image Catalogue]
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

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

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. The video and audio recordings are now inaccessible due to outdated plug-ins, but some of the transcripts of 21 interviews can still be consulted.

Topics: Arts & Culture

Keywords: sport

The Leeds Archive of Vernacular Culture (LAVC) comprises the multi-media archives of the Survey of English Dialects (SED) that ran from the 1950s to early 1960s and the University of Leeds’s Institute of Dialect and Folk Life Studies (IDFLS) that operated 1964-1983. it includes, among many other formats, audio recordings of informants from most Survey localities as well as Over 800 audio recordings made by the Institute relating to dialect and folk life across the UK and abroad.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore

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

Legasee is a registered charity dedicated to preserving the stories of British military veterans through filmed oral history interviews. Their website makes accessible hundreds of video interviews with veterans in chronological and thematic collections. Especially strong on the Second World War, with sub-collections on D-Day, Naval Convoys and the 'Secret War' (intelligence, sabotage, etc.).

Topics: War & Conflict

Keywords: military_history; WWI; WWII; Cold War

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. [Now only accessible via Wayback Machine]

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 raw data consisting of interviews as well as questionnaires, observations and ephemera.

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

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

Ongoing Wellcome-funded project exploring how Londoners, New Yorkers and Parisians have thought and felt about heat and its impact on their health. Includes a oral history arm in London, initially centred on Somers Town, but now expanded across the capital and working with a range of individuals, community organisations and policymakers.

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

The National Folklore Collection's Audio & Video materials feature some 12,000 hours of audio recordings, including a large collection of early audio formats such as wax cylinders, acetate disks, wire-tape and magnetic-tape recordings. The interviews recorded cover many aspects of Irish folklore, folk music, ethnology and oral history, and were collected, for the most part, by professional fieldworkers. The recordings are in English and in Irish, with other languages, such as Breton, Manx and Scottish Gaelic, also represented. 329 hours of audio have been digitised via the Dúchas project.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore

Keywords: customs; folktales; music; songs

Established in 1987 with the mission to record and preserve a wide range of voices through in-depth biographical accounts, National Life Stories is an independent charitable trust within the Oral History section of the British Library. The audio recordings of its interviews are available to listen to in full at the British Library, St Pancras. Remote access continues to be hampered by the fallout of the 2023 cyberattack on the Library, but some audio and video extracts can be accessed through the NLS webpage.

Topics: Arts & Culture; Politics & Government; Work

Keywords: industry; politics; religion; sports