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In January, StoryCorps staffers will be recording in Juneau, San Francisco, Tucson and Tampa, as well as the New York StoryBooth (pictured) now in Foley Square.
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Atlanta booth may be exception in StoryCorps’ highly mobile future
Now in its sixth year, after some 24,000 oral history interviews, StoryCorps is evolving new variations for both intake and output of its intimate personal stories.
The nonprofit is developing a website with social-networking features and will let subjects decide whether to put their interviews online, founder Dave Isay says. Details are yet to be announced.
StoryCorps is also working with a future civil rights museum in Atlanta to establish a permanent booth in its new building—and opening at pubradio station WABE-FM next year until the museum opens in 2011.
This fall, CPB and StoryCorps will launch Historia, a special outreach for Hispanic Americans, patterned after the Griot initiative for African-American oral histories, also CPB-supported. The Griot project, with 2,500 interviews, has now become the largest archive of interviews of African-Americans, he says, surpassing the 1930s WPA interviews (mostly handwritten) with former slaves.
Beyond its own recordings, StoryCorps has begun an annual day-after-Thanksgiving event for do-it-yourself oral historians—the National Day of Listening on Nov. 28. After little more than a week’s publicity, much of it through NPR’s Morning Edition, the event prompted at least 30,000 families to do interviews on a single day—more than StoryCorps has recorded in five years, Isay says.
He doesn’t plan to add National Day of Listening tapes to the group’s collection at the Library of Congress, but StoryCorps will advise participants how to put their material online.
StoryCorps began with a StoryBooth in Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal, and now operates a freestanding booth in Foley Square near the U.S. courthouse. But Atlanta probably will be the only permanent site for a booth the group will establish for many months to come, he says.
If funds are raised, StoryCorps will have a place in the Center for Civil and Human Rights, which the city and Morehouse College aim to open in Atlanta in 2011. At its core are the papers of Martin Luther King Jr., but the Center will deal with other human rights issues as well as the African-American movement. Oral histories will “contribute to the ongoing story” of civil rights, says Doug Shipman, executive director, and visitors will be welcome to record interviews about other subjects as well. The center will keep a set of the recordings, which will also go into the Library of Congress.
Plans for the Atlanta booth came together with a gentle push from Kathy Anemogiannis, a fan of the StoryCorps excerpts on Morning Edition who adopted the booth as a community service project for a course that she was taking. Anemogiannis lobbied both Shipman and WABE and, with two friends, has begun raising funds for the booth. Their target, says Shipman, is $100,000.
StoryCorps generally hits the road, however. It operates two roving Airstream trailers, plus a portable booth that hangs out in selected cities for long periods — it’s now spending a year in San Francisco — but Isay says the nonprofit is emphasizing flexible “door-to-door” teams that do a day’s recording in various community centers, hauling in their recording gear in a suitcase on wheels.
While StoryCorps still takes reservations from people who want to record an interview, Isay says, it reserves half of its interview slots for outreach efforts, especially for people who might not take the initiative themselves, including recent immigrants and others “who may not be in the public radio community already.”
The subjects may be part of the Griot or Historia efforts or the Memory Loss initiative, which aims to catch important memories of people who are slipping into dementia.
Web page posted Dec. 24, 2008
Copyright 2008 by Current LLC
