Oral History: StoryCorps Adds Thousands of Stories to National Archive, Browse and Listen Online
From the AP:
The nonprofit oral history project StoryCorps says its unprecedented national effort to collect thousands of one-on-one, intergenerational interviews over the Thanksgiving weekend was a success.
Schoolchildren using a StoryCorps smartphone app have uploaded 37,000 recordings to a publicly accessible Library of Congress archive since Nov. 23.
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MUCH More From the Folklife Today Blog/Library of Congress
Thanks to The Great Thanksgiving Listen, the StoryCorps collection of interviews has doubled! Since the launch of StoryCorps.me mobile app in March, more than 68,000 interviews have been uploaded as of today—the vast majority of them in the few days following Thanksgiving.
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The surge in mobile interviews is the result of StoryCorps’ efforts to partner with major national education organizations and a half dozen of the nation’s biggest school districts. More than 20,000 teacher toolkits were downloaded, the initiative was featured on the homepage of Google, and in both the Apple and Google app stores, not to mention remarkable media coverage. (There is already talk of The Great Thanksgiving Listen 2016.)
At the Library, we are able to meet the challenge of acquiring tens of thousands of interviews at a time thanks to the ability to harvest them via the web. The process involves using StoryCorps’ application programming interface (API) to download the data. For the last several months, Kate Zwaard and David Brunton, who manage the Library of Congress’s Digital Library software development, have been working with Dean Haddock, StoryCorps.me’s lead developer, to perfect this means of transfer. This interview with Zwaard and Brunton explains that process, provides advice for those who want to do similar projects, and ponders the future of scaling archival acquisitions.
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Direct to StoryCorp Digital Archive and Apps
See Also: StoryCorps Formally Launches New Global Platform, iOS and Android Apps Available (March 28, 2015)
Filed under: Associations and Organizations, Data Files, Digital Collections, Digital Preservation, Interactive Tools, Interviews, Libraries, News, Profiles

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.