Last Saturday I spent 5 hours at the Tulsa Historical Society taking inventory and found 38 reel-to-reel tapes the oldest of which is dates 1967. The reels are indexed and abstracted and some are fully transcribed with all of these documents being organized by interviewee name in five 3-ring binders. A sixth binder has some “deed of gift” documents. There is also a card file with subject listings that cross reference to reel number, side and approximate time from start. The paper items are mostly type-written with several bearing hand written notes. All in all the reels are well organized but of course they are old, fragile and should really be handled by experts and anyway there is no practical way for us to play reel-to-reel even if it were in the best possible condition.

I also found 209 cassette tapes with 200 marked and 9 unmarked. Of the 200 marked, 18 were each wrapped by two sheets of paper. One was an assignment sheet describing the tape as containing a World War II oral history interview conducted in 1992 by a Tulsa Community College young scholar program and listed the names of both the interviewer and interviewee among other pertinent information. The other document was a release signed by the interviewee. I did have a cassette player and so chose random samples to listen to and gauge quality. The interviewers are elementary school youth asking pre-written questions and the audio quality is, sadly, very poor.

The remaining 182 cassettes bear no identification or indexing aside from writing on the cassette and/or the jacket. One group of them is numbered 1-70 and a random listening sample of 6 tapes suggests that these are recordings of historical society meetings but the labeling does not make it clear. I also could not tell from what year these recordings came. There is a group of 20 cassettes of fair audio quality that are marked as oral interviews with the interviewee name from 1976-1979. There is a group of 16 cassettes that are also marked as oral histories with interviewee names but these appear to be much older and in fact their housings are all damaged such that I could not play them but I think an expert could sufficiently restore the content since that tape itself is undamaged. There are also 29 cassettes that are all marked but have no characteristics suggesting they belong together or in any other group. They are just random recordings. Finally, there are 47 cassettes of very good audio quality all dated 1980. In listening to a random sample I discovered that these are oral histories and that interviewers are all volunteers from the Junior League of Tulsa which engaged in a project at that time called the Historic Preservation Project.

I estimate that the total of the physical tapes represents at least 250 interviews (probably more) and several were high profile Tulsans. One of the random samples indicated an interviewee born in 1888. So there is likely to be some valuable, rich content but it is not accessible. Proper evaluation and identification of the content requires that everything first be digitized given the age and condition of the analog tape. Digitization, evaluation and organization of these items is a project by itself and is actually outside of the scope of my project. But my project is related in four ways: (1) to locate the appropriate technology to store, organize and deliver all content which will include these items, (2) to create an organizational structure (indexing, etc.) for use in the technology system ultimately implemented, (3) to prepare a request for proposal to digitize, and (4) to search for funding (grants or sponsorship) to acquire the technology and digitize the items. If I can get those things done the actual digitization, evaluation and organization project of these items will be a project available to another enterprising student.