SUNY Oneonta's Milne Library worked with the Cooperstown Graduate Program to digitize over 13,000 catalog cards that represent the vast collection of oral histories and related materials created and compiled by past Cooperstown Graduate Program students. The majority of the cards correspond to research, including fieldwork and oral histories, conducted by graduate students in CGP’s American Folk Culture track from 1964 to 2000.
The research files and audio recordings, which exist on reel-to-reel and cassette tapes, cover topics such as farming, tourism, rural healthcare, the environment, folklife, and social activism from narrators across New York State. The earliest recordings include individuals’ reflections on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a critical period of transformation in rural New York State. These field recordings are part of a larger collection of oral history interviews, which are still being collected today, now called CGP Community Stories.
Scope of Collection
This digital collection is a very small sampling of the larger 13,000 collection of digitized cards. This collection is meant to give researchers an idea of what exists in the full collection.
It also illustrates the design and function of card catalogs generally, a once ubiquitous tool of the 20th century that was made obsolete with the rise of computers. There are three kinds of cards in this collection: subjects (e.g. "DAIRY INDUSTRY"), narrators (e.g. "Ottelein, Susan", and projects (e.g. thesis projects). The projects were given identification numbers, like 77-0302, where the first two digits are the year of publication. Student authors were listed with their projects on the cards, and in this digital collection, those authors are named as Contributors.
