The New York Public Library is developing and executing a visionary strategy for digitization, digital preservation, and access. The Library stewards rapidly growing collections of digitized and born-digital collection items, and it works to make these collections easier to discover, sample, use, and reuse in more creative ways.
Learn about the Community Oral History Project below.
Explore our other current and previous projects and learn about our Digital Research Strategy for 2021–2024.
Community Oral History Project
Status: Archived
Launched: 2016
The New York Public Library's Community Oral History Project was an initiative taking place at NYPL branches that aimed to document, preserve, and celebrate the rich history of the city's unique communities by collecting the stories of people who have experienced it firsthand. As part of this project, we developed an Open Transcript Editor that will make it easy for people everywhere to correct transcripts for over 500 recorded stage stories from The Moth and over 1,000 stories from the Oral History Project. This community driven initiative allowed anyone to help us correct computer-generated transcripts, making them searchable and discoverable. This project was made possible with generous support provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Community Oral History Project was retired in 2020. The archived oral histories are available here, while the crowdsourcing transcription tool is available here.
Photo: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library. "Armistice Day; Lenox Ave., 4 West 134th Street; Harlem, 1919" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. Learn more.