Dr. Meryem Suzan Rosita Kalayci turned up in the RBML reading rooms to review the Columbia Armenian Oral History Collection with an offer the Oral History Archives at Columbia (OHAC) couldn’t refuse: she had a major research grant to transcribe all 130+ interviews in the collection.
The collection has been in various states of processing since 2004, including cataloging and analog-to-digital reformatting. Dr. Kalayci’s offer to help transcribe the interviews will help level up the collection from audio-only to fully accessible with audio and transcripts.*
As noted in the finding aid, the collection consists of 210 hours of,
…interviews in Armenian, English, and Turkish languages with immigrants conducted by Vazken L. Parsegian during the 1950s and 1960s, focusing largely on the survivors’ memories of their personal experiences of the abduction, deportation, imporisonment and massacre of Armenians and the destruction of Armenian communities under the Ottoman Empire in the first decades of the Twentieth century.
Read more about the launch of Dr. Kalayci and the Oxford Network of Armenian Genocide Research (ONAGR), OHAC’s new partner in making the Armenian Oral History Archive accessible to researchers. You can follow ONGAR on Twitter for updates.
https://armenianweekly.com/2020/03/11/oxford-university-launches-genocide-research-network/embed/#?secret=QJtYHaIk7J
* Transcription is just getting underway. We do not have a date for when the transcripts will be available to researchers. Interview audio is currently available to listen to via the Columbia University Libraries’ Digital Library Collections (DLC).
Posted in Oral History; Tagged Armenia, Armenian Oral History Archive, ONAGR, Oral History, Oxford Network of Armenian Genocide Research
Oxford Network for Armenian Genocide Research, TORCH Networks
