Oral Histories of Biology, Medicine, and Pandemic Response

FAIN: PB-276400-20

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Cold Spring Harbor, NY 11724-2202)
Ludmila Pollock (Project Director: May 2020 to October 2021)

The retention of two staff members and the creation of two new positions to advance work on their oral history initiative, reformatting and transcribing analog and born-digital recordings that are part of an internationally significant collection of primary source material on the life sciences and medical research since 1890.

CSHL’s humanities center seeks support for an oral-history (OH) project relevant to understanding the COVID-19 crisis but threatened by COVID-related disruption to our institution. This grant will fund preservation, curation, and scholarship on an existing library of 258 videos, including an OH collection of 209 videotaped conversations with participants in the molecular and genomic revolutions in biomedicine and 49 oral presentations by the invited speakers at a 2016 meeting on the history of HIV/AIDS. The grant will result in (1) digitization and transcription of these recordings; (2) completion of our OH Collection website, which contains a richly curated library of video clips and accompanying transcripts; (3) creation of a new interpretive, hyperlinked index to the entire OH collection; (4) addition of full transcripts and captioned video to our HIV/AIDS history website; and (5) new availability to researchers of full OH transcripts and video through the CSHL archives.