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ISO Oral Histories: StoryCorps Comes to D.C.

© Eugenia E. Gratto

For one year, StoryCorps, an acclaimed oral-history project, will be making its way around the country with two mobile recording booths in Airstream trailers. From May 19 to 28, they will be stationed in Washington, D.C., outside the Library of Congress.

StoryCorps is a national initiative to instruct and inspire individuals to record oral histories and create meaningful personal experiences for the participants. With 2,000 stories already collected from the project's first year, StoryCorps, the largest oral-history project ever undertaken, will collect more than 250,000 interviews over the next ten years. Traveling to every corner of the United States, the project will be documenting everyday history and the unique stories of grassroots America.

At each MobileBooth, a trained facilitator will help create a question list and handle the technical aspects of the recording. At the end of a forty-minute session, the participants walk away with a CD of their interview. With their permission, a second copy will be sent to the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library of Congress where it becomes part of a high quality digital archive. StoryCorps is the first born-digital audio collection for AFC, the largest oral narrative collection in the nation. This collection will eventually grow into an oral history of America. A $10 donation per session is suggested.

"Over the past year and a half, we've seen the profound effect StoryCorps has had on the lives of those who have participated in the project, and we've seen the power that these stories have had on the millions who have heard them," said Dave Isay, the NPR documentary producer who created the project. "We believe that listening is an act of love. StoryCorps will engage communities, teach participants to become better listeners, foster intergenerational communication, and help Americans appreciate the strength in the stories of everyday people they find all around them."

StoryCorps opened its first StoryBooth, a freestanding soundproof recording studio, in New York City's Grand Central Terminal in October 2003. A second StoryBooth will open this March on the site of the World Trade Center. Over the course of the 10-year project, StoryCorps plans to open StoryBooths - both mobile and stationary - across the country. StoryCorps is a project of Sound Portraits Productions, a non-profit public radio documentary production company founded by Isay.

"StoryCorps will provide America with important social documentation on a grassroots, nationwide scale that mirrors what the historic Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Writers' Project accomplished more than half a century ago," said Peggy Bulger, Director of the American Folklife Center. "We are delighted to be partners with StoryCorps and to house a new generation of America's stories."