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| Photo by National Park Service |
Oral history archives exist in many
forms and many places. There are miles of audio taped interviews and
reams of laboriously typed transcripts from those interviews. Most of
these marvelous collections are useless to the average person because
they are not accessible. Story Chip started with the simple idea that
the technology now exists to make oral history as accessible as an
episode of a network sitcom. The more stories and archives become
available, the more history is available to the curious.
Since we have just experienced another
presidential inauguration, lets focus on one of the presidential
libraries. You hear about these as each president leaves office and
decides on a location for the archive of presidential records as part
of the public record for future research and administered by the
National Archives. Dwight Eisenhower's library is located in Abilene,
Kansas, where he was raised and, like most presidential libraries, it
contains an amazing amount of material about the man and his time in
office. It also contains an impressive collection of oral history
interviews, a small sample of which can be viewed on line.
