Oral History - guide to resources: Anthropology & Folklore

British Library Sounds provides online access to a selection of the British Library's extensive collections of sound recordings, including oral history resources on a wide range of subjects. The recordings are arranged by subject area and are keyword searchable.

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

Keywords: portal

Calum Iain Maclean was a Scottish folklorist, collector, ethnographer and author. A selection of transcriptions and English summaries of Scottish Gaelic folk tales, songs and autobiographical details recorded by Maclean have been made accessible through this online database. The database is searchable by title, location, name of reciter, recording date, classification and keyword. The database is password protected and researchers must apply directly through the site for access. Maclean’s entire collections are held between the National Folklore Archive, University College Dublin and the School of Scottish Studies, University of Edinburgh.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore

Keywords: ethnology; folktales; Gaelic; songs; stories

This website provides online access to selected audio recordings of the Cork Folklore Project. Interview extracts can be accessed through an interactive map of the Cork area or are searchable by topic.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore; Arts & Culture; People; Work

Keywords: agriculture; community; death; games; music; sport

This British Academy project aimed to identify variation and changes in the East Midlands dialect which have taken place over the last century. It examined a number of recently recorded oral history interviews and compared them with those conducted in the latter half of the last century. Between six and eight speakers were selected as a representative sample for both male/female, younger/older and urban/rural speakers from each of four East Midlands counties: Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. Audio extracts from each of the interviews, many of them collected specifically for this project, are available to listen to online. The accompanying linguistic notes for each extract are also available to read online. These made note of any particularly interesting features of non-standard pronunciation (phonology), grammar and lexis (region-specific dialect words).

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore

Keywords: childhood; community; language

A collection of audio examples of dialect speech in the Welsh language, together with distribution maps of some dialect features. The recordings come from the archives of St Fagans: National History Museum and the Department of Welsh, Cardiff University, two institutions which have been collecting and recording oral testimonies since the 1950s.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore

Keywords: language; Welsh

Recordings of interviews and songs made by oral history pioneer George Ewart Evans are now available for anyone to listen to online through British Library Sounds. The recordings were produced from 1956 and 1977 and were primarily made in Suffolk, with a smaller number also made in Wales, Ireland and Scotland. They document rural life, agricultural work, folk beliefs about animals, medicine and witchcraft, and songs. 254 recorded items and available in total, which include approximately 140 interviews with individuals.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore; Work

Keywords: agriculture; medicine; music; songs; witchcraft

This website provides access to transcriptions of interviews conducted with elderly residents of the Glens abut their early memories of the area.

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

Keywords: agriculture; childhood; community; sport; WWI; WWII

[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 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 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

The recordings of 137 items documenting children’s play, folklore, language and literature have been made available for anyone to listen to online through British Library Sounds. The recordings were produced throughout England and Scotland from 1969 to 1983. There are also two sets of recordings made outside the UK, in Oslo, Norway and Capri, Italy.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore

Keywords: childhood; language; literature

The full transcripts and summaries of five oral history interviews exploring the lives and careers of a number of pioneers of social research are accessible online through the UK data service. The interviewees include Mildred Blaxter, Leonore Davidoff, Ray Pahl, Paul Thompson and Peter Townsend. A Pioneers of Qualitative Research website was also created in the course of the project, which hosts audio and written extracts from the interviews that can be browsed by theme. The themes include academic discipline, early influences, research methods and women in academia. To access the full data set it is first necessary to sign into the UK data service using your institutional login.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore; Education; People; Work

Keywords: anthropology; sociology; women

This website hosts the audio files and transcripts of 30 Welsh songs recorded since the 1960s by David Roy Saer, a former research assistant of what was then the Welsh Folk Museum. The songs form part of a much larger collection held by the National Museum of Wales.

Topics: Culture & Folklore

Keywords: songs, Welsh

This archive consists of over 500 recordings of Somerset Life made since the 1970s by local historian Ann Heeley and a variety of other individuals and local history groups. A short audio clip from each recording is available to download from the website. The complete recordings are available to listen to at the Somerset Heritage Centre in Taunton or the Somerset Rural Life Museum, Glastonbury.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore; People; Work

Keywords: agriculture; community; WWI; WWII

The sound archive at St Fagans holds recordings of a wide range of folk narratives as told by oral storytellers in Wales during the second half of the twentieth century. Stories from nine of these storytellers have been made available to listen to online. The entry for each story includes the sound recording of the tale, the text of the narrative, an English translation and background notes. In order to appreciate the international context of the narratives, references have also been made, where appropriate, to types and motifs.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore

Keywords: folktales; stories; Welsh

This website is the result of a collaborative project to preserve, digitise, catalogue and make available online thousands of Gaelic and Scots recordings held by the School of Scottish Studies (University of Edinburgh), BBC Scotland and the National Trust for Scotland. Over 30,000 oral recordings of stories, songs, music, poetry, history, traditions and other information are available to listen to online. It is possible to search the recordings by keyword or browse them by Scottish county.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore; People

Keywords: folktales; Gaelic; music; poetry; songs; stories

Tocher (meaning a dowry in Scots) provides online access to some of the School of Scottish Studies’ collections of oral tradition. The site provides access to transcriptions rather than audio recordings. These are divided into categories according to type, including Features, Culture and Customs, Beliefs and Superstitions, Legends and Folktales, Tales (non-fiction), and songs.

Topics: Anthropology & Folklore

Keywords: childhood; community; folktales; songs; stories; work

YouTube provides access to a large quantity of resources, both oral history interviews and information videos on the conduct and practice of oral history. Some organisations, archives and oral history projects have their own YouTube channels.

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

Keywords: portal