The University Library of Freie Universität Berlin provides more than 35,000 students and 200 scholars with literature, information, and digital services for research, teaching, and studies at various locations.This also includes archiving and providing audiovisual research data in the field of oral history.

Since 2018, the Center for Digital Systems (CeDiS) has also been part of the University Library with its Digital Interview Collections department. Since 2006, oral history archives have been established here, digital research and learning environments have been developed, research projects and courses have been supported or initiated, publications have been developed, and conferences and summer schools have been organized. With funding from the DFG, BMBF, AA and various foundations, among others, innovative third-party funded projects in the field of digitally supported oral history could be implemented.

On the one hand, external interview collections were made available: The Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation contains over 53,000 video interviews. CeDiS transcribed 950 German-language interviews starting in 2008 in the Zeugen der Shoah project. 150 interviews from the British Refugee Voices collection can be researched through metadata standardization via the library catalog. The Fortunoff Archive of Yale University with over 4,000 interviews is also available at the FUB.

In addition to these three external collections, Digital Interview Collections team has developed several of its own interview archives: Since 2008, the 590 interviews of Forced Labor 1939-1945 have been scientifically indexed in a specialized backend with workflow management and made available in a multilingual online archive with timecoded transcripts, faceted search, interactive map application, and notes function. Since 2018, Memories of the Occupation in Greece has presented 93 interviews in a bilingual research environment. Together with the Institute for Latin American Studies, Colonia Dignidad. A Chilean-German Oral History Archive has been developed since 2019. Other interview archives address flight attempts at the Iron Curtain, the Experienced History of Freie Universität, or the history of church asylum. Since 2006, the interview archives have been used in over 200 teaching events and research projects. Over 14,000 users are registered in the Forced Labor 1939-1945 archive (almost 1,000 new registrations per year).

Together with schools and memorials as well as partners in the Czech Republic, Russia, Poland and the Netherlands, the team created multimedia educational platforms as online applications for – also mobile – Learning with Interviews. The ASR4Memory project has developed a workflow for the privacy-oriented automated transcription of interviews as historical audiovisual research data. In the NFDI consortium 4Memory, the Digital Interview Collections group is involved in working groups on standardized data (TA2), interfaces (TA3), data literacy (TA4) and ethical issues (TA5). The interdisciplinary team is involved in scholarly debates on oral history and linguistics, digital humanities, artificial intelligence and research data as well as other methodical and ethical reflections.

The Digital Interview Collections Unit at the University Library / Center for Digital Systems of the Freie Universität Berlin contributes its software base, collection holdings, experience and networks to the project, and is responsible for the development and operation of the repository, indexing and research environment.

Team:

• Dr. Cord Pagenstecher (project management)
• Marc Altmann (software development)
• Jörg-Michael Baur (technical coordination)
• Christian Gregor (software development, freelance)
• Dr. Tobias Kilgus (AV media)
• Herdis Kley (Data curation)
• Jan Neflin (former student assistant)

Contact:

Freie Universität Berlin
University Library
Digital Interview Collections
Ihnestr. 24
14195 Berlin