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Digital Interview Collections at the University Library of the Freie Universität Berlin (FUB)

The University Library of Freie Universität Berlin provides more than 35,000 students and 200 scholars with literature, information, and digital services for research, teaching, and studies at various locations.This also includes archiving and providing audiovisual research data in the field of oral history.

Since 2018, the Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS) has also been part of the University Library with its Digital Interview Collections department. Since 2006, oral history archives have been established here, digital research and learning environments have been developed, research projects and courses have been supported or initiated, publications have been developed, and conferences and summer schools have been organized. With funding from the DFG, BMBF, AA and various foundations, among others, innovative third-party funded projects in the field of digitally supported oral history could be implemented.

On the one hand, external interview collections were made available: The Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation contains over 53,000 video interviews. CeDiS transcribed 950 German-language interviews starting in 2008 in the Zeugen der Shoah project. 150 interviews from the British Refugee Voices collection can be researched through metadata standardization via the library catalog. The Fortunoff Archive of Yale University with over 4,000 interviews is also available at the FUB.

In addition to these three external collections, CeDiS has developed several of its own interview archives: Since 2008, the 590 interviews of Forced Labor 1939-1945 have been scientifically indexed in a specialized backend with workflow management and made available in a multilingual online archive with timecoded transcripts, faceted search, interactive map application, and notes function. Since 2018, Memories of the Occupation in Greece has presented 90 interviews in a conceptually similar bilingual research environment on a new software basis, which has also been used for Forced Labor 1939-1945 since 2019. Together with the Latin America Institute, Colonia Dignidad. Ein chilenisch-deutsches Oral History-Archiv has been built since 2019. Currently, additional instances of this software are being created for interview archives on the border regime of the GDR and university history. In the HERA "Uses of the Past" project Accessing Campscapes, CeDiS investigated the use of interviews in memorial sites; in the process, a cross-collection online catalog of eyewitness interviews is being created.

Together with schools and memorial sites as well as partners in the Czech Republic, Russia, Poland and the Netherlands, CeDiS is developing multimedia educational offerings – also in mobile form – to learn with Interviews. In these third-party funded projects, tools for digital collection management and searching in non-linear media were developed and tested, on which Oral-History.Digital can build upon. To this end, CeDiS cooperates with partner institutions in Germany and abroad, such as CLARIN-ERIC, the UK Data Archive, the European Holocaust Research Infrastructure (EHRI), the Shoah Foundation Institute Los Angeles, the Amsterdam School for Heritage and Memory Studies, the Regional Center for Oral History in Voronezh, King's College London, the Oral History Network, among others.

The interview archives have been used in over 180 courses and research projects since 2006. Over 12,000 users are registered in the Archive Forced Labor 1939-1945 (almost 1,000 new registrations/year). The annual DAAD Summer Schools and the support of qualification theses promote young academics. The interdisciplinary team around project leader Dr. Cord Pagenstecher is engaged in scholarly debates on oral history and linguistics, digital humanities and research data, at CLARIN and DHd conferences as well as in the Working Group for Digital Humanities of the german Association of Historians and at workshops of partner projects such as REFI or aviDa. The methodological reflection on the heterogeneous character of existing collections plays an important role. CeDiS is also involved in the current debate in the social sciences via the Berlin methodological meetings. In the NESTOR group Media, CeDiS participates in the discussion about long-term archiving of AV media.

The Digital Interview Collections Unit at the University Library / Center for Digital Systems of the Freie Universität Berlin contributes its software base, collection holdings, experience and networks to the project, and is responsible for the development and operation of the repository, indexing and research environment.

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Contact:

Freie Universität Berlin
University Library
Digital Interview Collections
Ihnestr. 24
14195 Berlin