This portal provides access to American oral history and sound archive material, using open source software to enable content providers to store and catalogue their files so that their collections can be preserved in perpetuity. The software allows the files to be tagged with rich metadata (including recording date, broadcast date, location, subject, interviewer and interviewee) so that the collections can be easily searched and accessed by researchers. The material is streamed and is not available for download and new material is being added as it is digitised and catalogued.
Collections include Studs Terkel’s interviews from the 1952-1997 radio show, The Studs Terkel Program, on the Chicago station WFMT, featuring Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Sidney Poitier and Diane Arbus, amongst others. Other collections, such as the Pacifica Radio Archives and Illinois Public Media document some of the most significant changes in recent American history, particularly the 1950s and 1960s. First hand accounts from prime movers and campaigners in the African-American civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and from student activism and gay rights campaigners, present a vital picture of a time of political and social upheaval from outside the mainstream US media.