annehart

Oral histories are transferred onto flash drives, CD discs, and other devices as well as being transcribed and printed out in text. That's for when technology advances so that you can't play the oral histories until they're transferred to the next level of technology. For example, that would be like transferring what's on 78 rpm phonograph records from 1956 onto tape and then onto mobile MP3 players or video file players, DVD discs, and flash drives as well as other types of audio or video files.

You create a time capsule starting with the bare essentials which would be the printed out text or transcript of an oral history and any photographs. One place to start is with school yearbooks. The main branch of the Sacramento library has old high school year books from the 1930s and 1940s.

Also, the various cemetery associations sometimes keep school year books. For out of town high school yearbooks, I found the 1930 yearbook for Hagarstown high school. It's located in Hagarstown, which is a small town in Maryland. It had photographs of relatives who were born around 1911 and poems, what they enjoyed, the academic clubs they belonged to, and the work they did in various sports during the high school years.

Most of the women joined the drama club and the French language club. And many males were on the basketball team and joined the discussion club. On the photos the males wore suits and ties with white shirts, and the women wore business-type dresses with a string of pearls for the school photos.

Males had short-cropped hair, clean cut. Females had short hair neatly combed in the latest 1930 styles. Many women had a deep interest in learning various languages and in joining the history club. The point is how many and who landed in Sacramento eventually and why in or shortly after 1930. That was the year that the major economic depression hit the U.S.

Did you know the highlights of your life story experiences are wanted by many public libraries? Also, you can record the life stories of other people and submit them to various public libraries.

First you check out the oral history libraries in the US and find out whether they want your oral history recorded as MP3 files on audio or as various types of videos. Also check out Internet Archive: Digital Library of Free Books, Movies, Music to see whether you can upload your oral history, talk, interview, or life story recording in audio or video to their database. This archive also takes recorded music as well as text files.

Keep the oral histories to about a half hour on each recording so people can pause before listening to any recordings that last longer. Or limit the videos to 15 minutes each. You also can post them on Internet Archive or uTube. But if you're interested in oral interviews, you can find other people's oral histories in various libraries.

For example, in Sacramento, you can find oral histories in the CSUS library. First you go to the library home page, LibraryCSUS, and in the grey search box type: Oral History Interview. Click 'search' and you'll find hundreds of oral histories of various people.

Those with the status as not checked out can be checked out using your library card. The public can purchase a library card to most any university in the USA for a small fee. Those oral histories with status as for library use only can not be checked and but can be listened to in the library.

Also, if you go into a library, you can browse the shelves under the call numbers for oral histories. For example, in the CSUS library, the shelves on 2South have call numbers E 184 J3, which are oral histories of Japanese Americans. These can be checked out.

The call numbers F 866.4 are part of the State Oral History Program in California and can't be checked out. But for items that can be checked out of any library in the USA, look into interlibrary loans where something from most university libraries can be sent to your branch of most public libraries in the USA, if the item is listed as something that can be checked out. In other cities, check out your own town's resources, schools, and libraries to see where past decades high school yearbooks are kept.

Or create your own oral history project and offer your own life story highlights to public libraries either as audio recordings or videos or multimedia. Other libraries that have oral history projects include Oral Histories - University of California History Digital Archives, Suffragist Oral History Project (Regional) - The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley, and AIDS Oral History Projects | UCSF Library. Sacramento has the Capital Campus Oral History Program - Sacramento State University.

Have you thought of developing your own oral history project on a topic of interest to many or of interest to your family and friends? What's great about oral history projects is that the audio or video recordings can be saved for generations and transferred from one form of technology to the next, with also a printed out transcript of what's on the recording for a time when advanced technology no longer can play the recorded life story made on the older form of the technology.

If high school year books become a project you want to transfer to DVDs or CDs, year books and similar records also make time capsule gifts to future generations and public historians. Also check the cemetery associations for any high school year books kept on file as some of these associations do have small libraries of high school year books. And see the site, Cemetery Records Online.