Archives and Special Collections are delighted to have received funding from the University’s Vice Chancellor’s Fund to create a University wide oral history project with colleagues in the Scottish Political Archive and the Division of History, Heritage and Politics. A year on from the beginnings of lockdown, this oral history project will explore how staff and students at the University have worked, lived, coped and persevered through the unchartered territory that followed.
The team hope to speak to a broad spectrum of our University community from students scattered across the world to staff who kept things going on campus and everyone in between. It has been a strange year, one the University will remember for a long time to come and everyone’s experiences have been varied and important.
The project will recruit student volunteers and train them in oral history interviewing so that they can interview students who would like to participate in the project. Staff interviews will be conducted by Rosie Al-Mulla, Sarah Bromage and Stephen Bowman.
The oral history interviews will be added to the Coronavirus Pandemic Archive in Archives and Special collections which links to the NHS Forth Valley Archive, the Scottish Political Archive and the University’s own archive which are all housed in IS. At the end of the project, the team will commission a short film comprising of interview clips and digital material that has been donated through our various contemporary collecting strands – this will be made available to the University community and also added to the archive. The film will showcase what a rich resource the archive collection is and demonstrate the achievements, compassion and fortitude of our University community during this time.
Further details on participating in the project will be circulated in due course. In the meantime, please be aware that you can still donate images and diaries to the Coronavirus Pandemic Archive. Email archives@stir.ac.uk for more information or click on the link above.
