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About Our Stories
...How would you like to be remembered?
...What was the saddest moment in your life?
...What is your proudest achievement?
...When did you first fall in love?
Answering questions helps us frame the stories of our lives. As we speak, we become storytellers. As we listen, we hear echoes of our own lives and discover new worlds through others. By empowering storytellers and interviewers around the world to record and share their voices online, Our Stories™ aims to create a virtual archive of stories of everyday life.
Our Stories was founded by UNICEF, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), and Google, and to help collect, preserve, and share online the stories of the world's people and their cultures and communities. The OLPC initiative, partnered with existing UNICEF projects, gives children the tools to interview, record, and share the stories of their parents, grandparents, and others in their families and communities. The focus during this phase is on children in developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia where OLPC computers are available. Eventually, children and others will be able to share and access recorded stories directly through the Our Stories Children's site.
Our Stories is also committed to providing access to people’s stories from around the world in their native languages. You can also hear stories collected by the Museum of the Person in Brazil, and by UNICEF from Ghana, Pakistan, Tanzania, and Uganda. And we anticipate adding stories from Argentina, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and other countries soon.
Explore the Find a story map and menu to hear extraordinary stories from the everyday lives of people around the world.
The Our Stories site also has free Interview Guides for children and adults. Whether you are recording interviews for the OLPC initiative, an oral history initiative such as StoryCorps® (one of our inspirations), or for a personal, family, or community archive, these guides and the Our Stories site will help you discover this wonderful way of preserving memories for the future.
We want you to share your voice, your stories, and your world, with Our Stories.
Listen. Learn. Live.
Additional Resources
Storytelling is the heart of human history. Many museums, archives, libraries, universities, and cultural organizations around the world collect and preserve oral histories for future generations. Now, thanks to modern recording technology and the power of the internet to store and share content, many of these collections are accessible online. Our Stories is proud to join the community of organizations that offer easy access to their collections on-site.
The following is a small sampling of oral history resources worldwide. All you have to do is look – and listen. If you have a favorite collection you don't see on this list, feel free to tell others about it in the Our Stories Google Group.
Selected Oral History Collections
- African Digital Online Library: Fuuta Tooro Oral History Collection
(West Africa)
- The Alan Lomax Collection (The American Folklife Center, Library of
Congress, Washington, DC)
- British Library National Life Stories (London, UK)
- Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies Oral History Project (American
University of Beirut)
- Center for Digital Storytelling (Berkeley, California)
- Centre for Popular Memory (Cape Town, South Africa)
- Oral History Research Center (Columbia University Libraries, New York,
NY)
- Inside Lives (BBC, London, UK)
- Local Legacies Project Collection (The American Folklife Center, Library
of Congress, Washington, DC)
- Mapping Memories: Reminiscences with Ethnic Minority Elders (London,
UK)
- Museum of the Person (Sao Paolo, Brazil) - content
partner
- National Library of Australia, Oral History & Folklore (Canberra)
- Oral History Digital Collection (Youngstown State University, Ohio)
- The Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program (Washington, DC)
- Southern Oral
History Program (University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill)
- StoryCorps (New
York, NY)
- Studs Terkel: Conversations with America (Chicago Historical Society)
- Veterans History Project (Library of Congress, Washington, DC)
- Virtual Oral / Aural History Archive (California State University,
Long Beach)
- Voices
on Europe - Historical Archives of the European Union (Florence,
Italy)
Selected Oral History Resources & Organizations
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