“Although we look after a lot of oral history collections in the archives at the Library, it was a completely new experience for us to lead a project to create one ourselves and there was a great deal to think about in the initial planning stages. LSE/Nigel SteadĮmma Pizarro, an archivist at LSE Library who was on the project, spoke about her experiences:

A member of the cleaning staff wearing a mask and PPE, Old Building, September 2020. It was an enormous privilege to listen to LSE colleagues open up and speak about what has been for many an extremely painful period in the history of their time at the School.

In the latter half of 2022, trained archivists and curators at LSE Library worked in partnership with volunteer PhD students from LSE’s Department of International History to conduct these oral histories with members of the LSE community.

You can listen to an example of an Oral History project from the Women’s Resource Centre, available on the LSE Digital Library. The audio and transcript of these interviews are then archived and made available for the future researcher. Oral histories are one way to address this by inviting people to speak freely and tell their story in their own words of what life was like for them. Official documents that relate to significant events in history are an invaluable resource to the future historian, but what they often exclude are the feelings and experiences of the people that lived through it. In this second post, Library curator Daniel Payne speaks to members of the project team as they reflect on the process of conducting these oral histories, where the LSE community were invited to speak about the impact of the pandemic on their lives. In 2022, LSE Library shared details of a project to archive the experiences of the LSE community during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Oral history by lee smith