Port Washington Public Library

Oral History - Text Only

The Oral History Program was founded in 1980 at the Port Washington Public Library to capture on tape the memories of those men and women who have shaped Port Washington's history, and to preserve that memory for future generations. Elly Shodell, M.A., M.L.S, directs the program, assisted by trained community volunteers and student interns who conduct interviews and help in editing and processing tapes, transcripts and archival photographs and documents. Shodell is chair of the publications committee of the Oral History Association and sits on the Board of the New York Folklore Society, Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region, and the Journal of Long Island History.

Current status of the Oral History collection
The Oral History Collection now holds more than 200 interviews and 8,000 pages of transcript, each indexed and summarized. Themes have included: African American families; the great estates; sandmining; maritime traditions; and library history; aviation history and folk traditions. We continue to build our collection. Recently, we have undertaken major projects on Port's business community and aviation heritage. Nationwide, there are more than 4,000 oral history projects, many of them centered in public libraries.

Use of Oral History at the Port Washington Public Library
Each year, scholars, students, journalists and community members use our materials. Historical exhibits, radio programs, school projects, and major works of historical scholarship, including books and articles, have drawn extensively upon our oral history collection.

Oral History Exhibitions & Public Programs: attracting audiences
In addition to fulfilling the library's traditional role of collecting, organizing, preserving and facilitating use of the written record, the oral history program also actively responds to the community's demonstrated interest in local history. We offer talks, workshops, lectures, walking tours, exhibitions, film screenings and special events. Always working with community members and volunteers, we have developed projects that focus on local culture and history, that examine important social issues and that point to broad cultural and intellectual traditions. Some examples of the ways in which oral history has been used at the Port Washington Public Library are:

• Traveling Exhibition: "It Looks Like Yesterday to Me: Six Generations of the African American Family on Long Island"(funded 1980-1982)-oral history, audio montage, photographs and artifacts.
• Traveling Exhibition, Walking Tour, Community Forums: "Particles of the Past: Sandmining on Long Island, 1870s-1980s" (funded 1985): Occupational folk-life exhibition.
• Traveling Exhibition, Audio Montage, Video, Discussion Groups: "In the Service: Workers on the Great Estates of Long Island, 1890s-1990s"(funded 1987-1989): Themes of immigration, recruitment, and industrialization.
• Conference: Long Island Sounds(funded 1982): Co-sponsored by the Nassau County Museums, hands-on oral history demonstrations and panel discussions with scholars, filmmakers and radio producers.
• Videotape, Curriculum Guide: Artist and Scholar in Residence Program (funded 1986): A collaboration between video artist Warrington Hudlin, historian George Cunningham, and Port Washington high school students.
• Exhibition, Lecture Series: "Cross Currents: Baymen, Yachtsmen and Long Island Waters"(funded 1991): Explored issues of cultural contact and the "new" maritime history as it relates to L.I.
• Exhibition, Folk Arts Festival: "Changing Channels: Maritime Folk Artists on Long Island" (funded 1992): Documented decoy carvers, fishermen, ice boater, taxidermist, story tellers and model boat builders who still carry out maritime traditions around Manhasset Bay.
• Exhibition, Videotape: "Century: 100 Years of the Port Washington Public Library" (funded 1992): Developed by Friends of the Port Washington Public Library, documented and celebrated our 100th anniversary.
• Cablevision documentary: "Back to Port": Featured photo and audio excerpts from the oral history program.
• Traveling exhibition, programs and publication: "Flight of Memory: Long Island's Aeronautical Past" (funded 1994).Chronicles flying boat era and beyond on the North and South shores of Long Island.
• Traveling exhibition: "Flight Patterns: Aviation Traditions on Long Island" (funded 1996). Portraits of men and women who currently are engaged in airplane modeling, restoration and collecting.
• Business Oral History Project (1996). Co-sponsored by the Friends of the Port Washington Public Library, Inc.
• CD-ROM: "Flight of Memory" (1999). A computer production based on the library's aviation exhibits and research resources.
• Medical Oral History Project (2001-?).

Oral History and New Technologies
In the past decade, new media (CD-ROMs, laser discs, networked electronic information) and new technologies have begun to transform both library services and the ancient discipline of history. These new media and technologies have increased our ability to reach library users and teach, research and present information. The Port Washington Public Library Oral History Program plans to apply new multimedia technologies to traditional materials building on the success of its recent Flight of Memory exhibition. Using hypertext and the multimedia capacities of CD-ROM, users will discover connections between material culture, photographs, and audio and video footage that will help them understand the story of aviation on Long Island.

Oral History Publications:
In order to create a permanent record of the traveling exhibitions we develop, the oral history department generates publications relating to each major project. Through our Oral History series we are able to "spread the word" about the work of the Port Washington Public Library, often inspiring other educational and cultural institutions around Long Island to start their own oral histories. Some of the venues which we have reached are: Society for the Preservation of Long Island Antiquities, Great Neck Public Library, North Hempstead Town Hall, Huntington Town Hall, Sea Cliff Village Museum, Suffolk County Historical Society, Garvies Point Museum, Coe Hall, Wunsch Arts Center, North Shore Science Museum, Freeport Public Library, Bryant Library, Middle Country Public Library, Glen Cove Library.

Click here for more information about Library Publications

Oral History Exhibitions
Our traveling exhibitions are user-friendly and educational. They are available for 2-3 month rentals at $250-$500. Shipping costs and insurance are the responsibility of the borrower and must be arranged through our office. Interpretive materials are available for many of the exhibits. We also provide borrowers with sample news releases, photographs and captions. Please call us at 883-4400 for more information.

Who funds oral history at the PWPL?
The oral history department raises funds for all major exhibits, books and thematic projects, beginning with its first grant from the Arwood Foundation in 1980. To date, Oral History has received funding in excess of $250,000 from state and federal agencies, private foundations, the Port Washington Public Library Foundation, and local corporations and businesses. It has also generated income of over $15,000 from book, videotape and poster sales and exhibition rental fees. In addition, the Friends of the Port Washington Public Library, Inc., has supported the Centennial and Business Oral History projects.

What are the future plans for oral history?
We would like to expand our series with Port Washington leaders in the fields of literature, music and the arts; to create documentation on the new immigrant communities; to develop a multimedia database; to print and distribute a catalog of the library's oral history holdings; and, to continue to build a well-rounded collection which embraces all fields of endeavor and to provide resources for our library users. Moving into the electronic age, we have produced and aviation CD-ROM that will applies new technologies to traditional library services by increasing access to our oral history collection and providing linkages between photographs, primary source documents, artifacts and text.

The Oral History Program: Background
The Port Washington Public Library Oral History Program was founded in 1980 in order to document and preserve the voices of residents who have been eyewitnesses to major local events and developments, from oyster farmers and clamdiggers and earliest African-American settlers to aviation pioneers, from workers in early sandmining and boat building industries to today's environmental, arts, business and political leaders. Initially started with a grant from the Arwood Foundation, our Oral History programs continue to be totally self-supporting through fundraising, book sales, exhibition rental fees and volunteer work.

Over the past 14 years, the library's Oral History Program has engaged in varied activities from transcribing, indexing and cataloguing more than 250 memoirs to conducting training workshops for community members in interviewing techniques. In addition, it has generated local history publications and articles, videotapes and Cablevision programs, traveling exhibitions, walking tours, slide shows, radio programs and arts-in-education projects with the schools.

Preserving the past is an important part of the Port Washington Public Library's function. And oral history has become increasingly useful in helping people to understand their own crucial role as participants in historic events whose documentation would otherwise be lost. Our memoirists and interviewers, volunteers from the community, are our greatest resource. Working together, our mission is to create primary source materials and interpretive programs which will educate and benefit generations to come.

Oral History Workshops: Building community identity
Community collaboration in our oral history program is most clearly evident in the oral history workshops which we offered through the Friends of the Port Washington Public Library. The Centennial Oral History Project and Business Oral History Project helped to meet our goals of adding to the library's archival collection, working with volunteers and bringing to the public an understanding of the past.

To date, the oral history program has worked with more than 250 volunteers, including treasured memoirists, who have generously shared their recollections and agreed to deposit their interviews and memorabilia in the library's archives. The workshops, which are ongoing and organized thematically, have succeeded in bringing in hard-to-reach elderly populations and "hidden" working people and retirees to our programs in the past, and will continue to be used as an outreach tool, helping us identify future audiences and participants. The success of our efforts is evident in the great response we get when our "call for volunteers" goes out for each new project.

Oral History Grants: Generating Support
Since 1980, a major function of the Oral History Department has been to conceive and write the grant requests that support its many programs. Over the years, we have received over $250,000 from state agencies such as the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York Council for the Humanities and the NYS Library Conservation Program, from federal sources such as the National Endowment for the Arts, and from corporations, foundations, private philanthropies and banks.

Oral History: Other service activities
The public library is a natural center for collecting oral history tapes and for organizing and coordinating programs that bring the past alive. Different from other types of historical documents in its active role in the interviewing process, oral history in Port Washington has sparked patrons' interest, generating excitement and enthusiasm about history. It has involved direct interaction between community members, some as interviewers and some as participants in history. Through oral history, the library has become an active participant in the creation of the historical record. The oral history department provides access to interviews and tapes, disseminates information about the oral history collection and publicizes programs that stimulate community involvement.

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