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An oral history collection – part of the University of Alabama in Huntsville’s Archives, Special Collections, and Digital Initiatives – features interviews with people who contributed to the aerospace field and shaped the university. A new oral history project is being launched with interviews to focus on the Army mission at Redstone Arsenal.
The goal of the project is “to document the Army experience at Redstone Arsenal,” Reagan Grimsley, head of Archives, Special Collections and Digital Initiatives, said. “One of the things that libraries do is that we carry information resources about the human experience and in particular through special collections and archives.”
The oral history collection, including the planned Army and Department of Defense collection, is “a way for us to build our collection and instead of bringing in people’s papers or bringing in books about the topic, we’re bringing in people’s personal experiences. It’s another way of telling a story.”
The Army and Department of Defense collection project is being done in collaboration with volunteers retired Maj. Hal Ernest and retired Maj. Gen. Vincent Boles, who will contact and line up contributors and conduct the interviews. “We have the time, we have the passion (for this project) and they’ve given us the opportunity and resources to do this.”
Interviews for the Army and Department of Defense collection are expected to get started around early May. “We do have a short list of who we want to pursue,” Ernest said.
“We’re looking for interviews of about an hour to a maximum of an hour and a half,” Grimsley said.
“Our oral history database to date has 450 interviews,” and those are broken down into a dozen different collections, said Drew Adan, archivist at UAH’s Louis Salmon Library. Some of those collections were donated.
The earliest interviews in the oral history collection include recordings of pioneers in the field of rocketry including Willy Ley, Wernher von Braun and Walter Dornberger, taped audio recordings that were a part of the Saturn V NASA History Project and video interviews of German rocket scientists recorded by Donald Tarter, a UAH sociology professor. A new series that Jack Stokes, who retired from Marshall Space Flight Center, is recording is called Aerospace History Interviews: II.
The department of Archives, Special Collections, and Digital Initiatives records interviews on a variety of topics, and they’re moderated by community partners in the library’s Digital Initiatives Lab.
The emotional responses of those who are interviewed “come through a lot more on a video and audio recording as opposed to somebody writing their memoirs and putting that down on a piece of paper,” Adan said.
“With video, you get to see somebody’s emotional response, the hand gestures they might use, facial expressions, how their voice changes as they are speaking about different topics,” he said. “It’s more a complete historical record in a lot of ways.”
“I see this as a public service project,” Grimsley said. “We feel that this is something we should be doing and that we should be making these accessible to the public, but we can’t do it on our own. Therefore, it’s this collaboration with local volunteers who want to see, in this case, the Army experience shared.”
Those interested in participating in the oral history project can visit oralhistory@uah.edu.
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