The current Public Perspectives exhibit, Living and Learning: Chinese Immigration, Restriction, and Community in Brooklyn, 1850 to Present curated by Andy Urban, features audio clips from BHS’s oral history collections – you can listen online or download the BHS podcast from iTunes (search the Store for Brooklyn Historical Society).

In 1993 – 1994, BHS and the Museum of Chinese in America, then known as the Chinatown History Museum, collected interviews regarding Brooklyn’s Chinese Community in Sunset Park.  The resulting oral history collection, 8th Avenue – Sunset Park Oral History Project (1993 – 1994), is housed at BHS and includes 28 interviews conducted by Mary Lui, Gregory Ruf, Fabiana Chiu, and Ka-Kam Chui, in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin.  Narrators include recent Chinese immigrants as well as people of Italian and Puerto Rican heritage who had lived in Sunset Park for generations.  Researchers have access to the transcripts and now, thanks to the careful, diligent work of BHS Oral History interns Alexis Taines and Niles French, researchers will now be able to LISTEN to these interviews as well.

Listening to an interview, a performative interaction between two people, hearing the narrator and the interviewer and their accents, intonations, meaningful pauses, tears, and laughter, is a very different experience from reading a transcript.  There is a lot of conversation in the oral history community about how to handle transcripts, which are still the safest way to preserve an interview, and the easiest medium to search through quickly, as well as the audio/video recordings, which contain so much more information than the text alone.  At BHS, we think it is important to make these audio/video documents accessible along with the transcripts.  To do this, we are digitizing the interviews that were originally recorded onto cassette.  This is a necessary step for preserving the audio, since cassette tapes decay, and once the recording is in the format of a digital audio file researchers can listen to the interview from any computer connected to our digital archive.

To date, BHS has digitized one complete collection: Brooklyn Business – Coney Island and Brooklyn Navy Yard (1974 – 1989) and we are moments away from finishing the digitization of all 69 interviews from the Puerto Rican Oral History Project (1973 – 1976) thanks to the very dedicated work of BHS Oral History Intern Amna Ahmad.

In order to complete the digitization of the 8th Avenue – Sunset Park Oral History Project (1993 – 1994), BHS needs volunteers who understand Cantonese and/or Mandarin – please contact us if you are interested!