Rollins College Oral History

Directory:

RATIONALE FOR THE

ROLLINS ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

Oral history refers to a qualitative research process based on personal interviewing, suited to understanding meanings, interpretations, relationships, and subjective experience. Oral history interviews investigate interactions, relationships, dynamics, and contexts. The outcome of an oral history project is the production of original historical documents, a new primary source for further research.

During the past few years while working as the Head of Archives and Special Collections, Professor Wenxian Zhang noticed that Rollins lacked a comprehensive oral history research program. In the fall of 2004, an oral history seminar was coordinated on campus by the College Archives, the Winter Park Historical Society, and the Winter Park Public Library; the program attracted faculty members from History, Anthropology and English Departments, as well as people from the local historical community. Based on the workshop, a grant application was submitted for a student-faculty collaborative program, and the Rollins oral history research project was launched in the summer of 2005. A subsequent grant was added five years later, and a series of oral interviews were conducted as part of Rollins' 125th Anniversary celebration in summer 2010.

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GOALS OF THE PROJECT

The goal of the oral history research project is to provide an open and candid platform for selected individuals to contemplate their years at Rollins, to reflect upon the challenges and celebrate the accomplishments of their academic careers in teaching, scholarship, and community services. Our long-term objective is to establish a comprehensive oral history archive, which will include not only faculty members, but also key staff, administrators, alumni and friends of the college. We believe such a collection will be a critical step to fully document the history of liberal arts education at Rollins College. Through the process, we will provide the involved students with a genuine opportunity to apply research skills learned from classrooms into meaningful practices.

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THE PROCESS

Review background information in the College Archives as related to selected individuals with long service records to the College; form a preliminary list of interview candidates;
Develop the project guideline and interview outlines; conduct training in interview techniques and equipment usage;
Conduct a series of interviews of individual members of the Rollins community, with focus on their leadership contribution, teaching, scholarship and community services at Rollins;
Transcribe the recorded interviews into textual documents according to established style guide; publish the final work on a special oral history research web page under the college archives;
Summarize our collective learning experience into a brief essay for possible submission to a professional publication.