Roots with Wings, a Floyd County Place-Based Education Project:: Intergenerational Connections

Floyd Story Center

Since 1998, a community oral history collection partnership of the Old Church Gallery, Ltd., Radford University’s Center for Social and Cultural Research, Honors Program, Scholar-Citizen Initiative, Appalachian Regional and Rural Studies Center, and Floyd County High School. Our archives now hold over 100 interviews.

In our Roots with Wings project, college mentors, high school staff, and community volunteers meet weekly during the school year to teach the discipline of oral history collection.


Students learn ethical, methodologically sound interview techniques, practice and complete several interviews, transcribe the audiotapes, create searchable content logs, archive interviewee resources and period photographs, learn the technology of audio and video recording, research historical backgrounds, acquire proficiency in iMovie and storytelling, and finally extract a theme from an hour long interview to create a seven minute movie production.

Monday, March 2, 2015

Why Archive?

A digital journey and using Creative Commons Search 

2001 RU class with Kathleen holding interview media files

With our first boxes of audio tapes and photographs from Dr. Melinda Wagner's 1999 and 2001 Radford University classes, the Floyd Story Center initiated an archival mission to preserve Floyd County oral history collections for future generations.  


In a digital age, this means assessing the information content, organizing the files for digital storage, and updating it for new forms of media as the decades pass. This semester, we are grateful for the help of Sam Kennedy, CSCR RU work study, as he reviews and refreshes these early transcript files for the community digital archives. 

And, as media creators, we are also fans of Creative Commons, the site that allows free sharing of information though open licenses.  Their search engine- http://search.creativecommons.org/ -  a portal for finding licensed content [ I want something that I can... ]   is definitely worth exploring.

 https://soundcloud.com/popuparchive/why-archive-with-nikki-silva 
Need more convincing?  Listen to The Kitchen Sisters, and hear how they became advocates for preserving and archiving their own WWII interviews and collected material from thirty years ago. 

Read more about our "Roots with Wings" WWII interviews in the blog posts below, and see previous years' interviews archived here.  Our inter-generational oral history program is currently helping Floyd County High School students prepare for new interviews this month.
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