Digitizing the Oregon Story: Creating Access to Significant Legal and Political Oral Histories

The Digitizing the Oregon Story project preserves and creates broad access to 212 Oral History interviews of significant legal and political figures, originally created on analog audio and video tapes and previously available only onsite in the OHS Research Library. Digitization and free online availability significantly expands public access to this unique primary source documentation of Oregon politics, law, and government on local, county, state, federal and international levels. The interviews comprise over 1800 hours of recorded sound and video, spanning from 1958 to 2011. Interviewees include lawmakers, judges, and government officials, with a wide variety of perspectives and insights.

In addition to making the complete interviews available online, we commissioned authors to write 30 new biographies for The Oregon Encyclopedia, listed below. These new OE entries, and an additional 69 existing entries in The OE and the Oregon History Project, are now linked to the interviews on OHS Digital Collections to further highlight these important primary sources for teaching and learning.

OHS library staff carried out this year-long project in 2019-2020 with support from an LSTA grant made available by the State of Oregon Library. Find out more about our work, along with related Tales from the Oral History Collections, on the the OHS Blog.

List of Interviews includes:


New entries to The Oregon Encyclopedia:

This project was supported in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Library Services and Technology Act, administered by the Oregon State Library.

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