Humanities and Social Sciences Library > Collections & Reading Rooms > Dorot Jewish Division> Oral History Collection

About Access

While some small regional collections are also held locally (the Bay Area collection, for example, at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley and the Chicago collection both at the Chicago Historical Society and at the Chicago Jewish Archives of the Spertus Institute), 95% of the transcripts at The New York Public Library currently exist only in the single copies held by the Library’s Dorot Jewish Division. The earliest transcripts, dating from the 1970s, are beginning to show their age, and now is the best time to address the issue of deterioration, before brittleness, with its consequences of text loss and difficult, expensive manual conservation, sets in. As a preservation measure, therefore, as well as the ideal means of optimizing access, the Library plans shortly to digitize the entire corpus of transcripts and to make the full text available on the Library’s Web site. Meanwhile, transcripts and tapes are freely available for study on-site only in the reading room of the Library’s Dorot Jewish Division.

The above should be qualified with two caveats, as follows:

i) The last 10% of the interviews were not transcribed and are available in audio cassette format only. An indication of the existence of a transcript or tapes or of both formats can be found in the alphabetical list of informants and in the bibliographic record for each interview in CATNYP, the online catalog of the Research Libraries of The New York Public Library. More generally, it may be noted that participants were invited to review a draft of the transcript of their interview. Not all of them did so or did so exhaustively. On the other hand, some informants took this opportunity to recast the way they had phrased this or that passage in their recorded interview. As a result, although the tapes are much more cumbersome to use than the transcripts, they can on occasion correct inaccuracies or reveal divergences.

ii) About 15% of the interviews were given on condition that they remain sealed—until a specified date or “until further notice”—or were deemed readable immediately, but only on a case-by-case basis with the informant’s express permission. The Library endeavors to open as many of these files as soon as possible. Closed or otherwise restricted interviews are designated by the words “Restricted access” after the call number in the CATNYP record.

Copies of transcripts may be ordered through the Library’s document delivery service, NYPL Express.

Passages of less than a page may be quoted in published works and should be cited in the first instance as: Interview with [Name of informant, date], The New York Public Library-American Jewish Committee Oral History Collection, Dorot Jewish Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations and thereafter in the same published work as: Interview with [Name of informant, date], Dorot Jewish Division, NYPL. For permission to quote more extended passages, please contact the Dorot Jewish Division (freidus@nypl.org). Audio excerpts may be obtained for a fee by arrangement with the Library’s Permissions department (permissions@nypl.org).