"Oral Histories of the American South" began as a small collection (21 interviews) developed to experiment with the online presentation of oral history interviews. For this project, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library built an interface to simultaneously display audio and transcripts from interviews. The UNC Library and the Southern Oral History Program continue to develop this collection to make it more useful to historians, students, and the general public.

For the pilot phase of the project, the UNC Library endeavored to take unique and valuable oral history interviews created by the Southern Oral History Program (SOHP) and publicly available at UNC-Chapel Hill's Southern Historical Collection and publish them online. We sought to present oral histories in a way that would allow researchers to locate relevant interview segments as well as review entire interviews. We also wanted to connect the text transcripts to the audio files in a way that would help users easily locate audio portions that interested them. In November 2005, we made our prototype version available, but we have continued to improve our Web presentation as the project matures and evolves. Please share your comments and suggestions with us.

This initial experimental effort was made possible with funding from the University Library. In September of 2005, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) granted the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill funding for a far more ambitious project: the digitization of 500 oral history interviews covering a variety of topics. Over the next three years (2005-2008), scholars in southern and oral history will select from the over 4,000 interviews conducted by the SOHP; topics included will be a focus on specific localities, civil rights, southern politics, and southern women. These selected interviews will be digitized and presented online along with materials to assist use of the oral histories in the classroom.

We will continue to improve the Web interface and the technology for using these interviews. We hope that our user community will help us identify problems and work with us to improve this initial effort.

The Southern Oral History Program, founded in 1973, has conducted over 4,000 interviews throughout North Carolina and the American South on a variety topics, including civil rights, women's issues, politics, and environmental transformations. The tapes and available transcripts of the SOHP interviews reside in the Southern Historical Collection in the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where they are processed, preserved, and made available to students, teachers, scholars, and general public. For this online collection, technicians at the Southern Folklife Collection have converted the audiocassette recordings to digital formats.

• Inventory of original oral history interview materials held by the Southern Historical Collection
• UNC Libraries Manuscripts Department's database of collected interviews