Oral Histories of the Disability Experience: Share Your Story

The Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library is launching an oral history project that will be the largest community-based effort of its kind to collect and document stories of the disability experience, and we want you to share your story.

About Our Project

Visible Lives: Oral Histories of the Disability Experience works to document, share, and preserve the experiences of people with disabilities through their own words. The project's interviews will be available in an archive at The Milstein Division, in a circulating collection at Andrew Heiskell Library, and on the New York Public Library website.

Our Interviewers

Last month, 45 interviewers were trained to help record these stories. Volunteers from many different backgrounds attended the training. There were writers, actors, educators and lawyers. There were interviewers who had personal or familial experience with a disability and interviewers who didn’t.  What they had in common was a motivation for this work. 

“What inspires you about this project?”  we asked  at the beginning of each training session. Everyone shared some version of a similar sentiment: “This is a part of history that is under-documented and making sure that these experiences are shared and recorded is important everyone. It’s important for researchers and historians definitely, but also listeners looking to hear an experience they can connect to, that they see themselves in. This is critical to the wellbeing of our city as a whole.”

Collecting History: A Call to Action

This is a part of history that is not readily available in a standard textbook or even many archives, so the Library is creating an alternative resource to bring it to light and we need your help.

There is a real sense of urgency to this work of collecting a history of disability. There are changing technologies, services, opportunities, constraints, and societal viewpoints.  What it means to have a particular disability is very different from one decade to the next… or from one neighborhood to another, or even from one family to the one next door.  

Visible Lives aims to bring breadth and depth to our current institutional knowledge of the subject by encouraging people from different backgrounds and generations to share their stories. The details in a personal recollection are an invaluable part of history. As they say—a thousand people is a statistic, one person is a story.

The Interview Process

In the process of collecting interviews, new friends and connections have been made. Wendy Wark interviewed Elinor Cohen for the project, finding out at the interview that they live across the street from each other. Ms. Wark and Ms. Cohen plan to attend the project kick-off event on November 22 together.

Storytellers get to share their story in exactly the way they want to. The interviewers are there to guide you with questions if you need them or to let you talk if you don’t. You will speak with an interviewer over the phone before meeting and discuss what you’re most comfortable with.

The average story is between 45 minutes and 2 hours. Interviews can be held at the library or at a place convenient to you. Storytellers will receive a copy of their story as a CD in the mail after it is recorded.

Please don’t hesitate to call us with questions. This project will continue until May 2015.

How You Can Share Your Story

Are you interested in sharing YOUR story for this collection? We’re looking for people who have experienced a disability of any kind to come tell their story. Please contact Alexandra Kelly (AlexandraKelly@nypl.org) or 212-621-0552 to be paired with an interviewer and share your story. We are also looking for ASL interpreters interested in volunteering to help with this project.