A database of interviews

Submitted by Dave Walden on Sat, 07/16/2011 - 09:56

Various organizations have archives of interviews, for example, CBI, the Computer Museum, and the IEEE History Center.  Of course, for a researcher seeking past interviews on a subject the interviewer is studying, it is easy enough to check each of the major archives, such as those just listed.  However, there are no doubt other archives containing such interviews.  I think it would be a useful resource to have posted on the web a comprehensive list of all such archives with their home-page URLs.  Better yet would be also to list all the interviews in each of the archives, sorted by interviewee name and interview date plus the URL of the archive containing the interview. 

It would be some work to collect the list of all of the archives, but it would be a highly worthwhile list to collect.  Call this Task 1.  I assume no permissions would be required to create and post such a list.  Maybe this already exists somewhere that I don't know about.
 
Once the comprehensive list of archives existed, it would be possible (a good bit of work but straight forward enough) to populate a database with the list of  interviews already in each database.  Call this Task 2.  In this case I suppose it would be desirable to have permission from the archives to include the lists of their interviews.  Ideally this database eventually also would include a record of interviews published in journals and books but not in archives.  In other words, what I am imagining is a database of both scholarly and journalistic interviews.
 
Once website or some or all of the above information is created, it would be very nice to also have listed interviews being planned and interviews in progress (i.e., done and recorded but not yet transcribe, or transcribed but not yet edited, or edited but not yet posted).  Call this Task 3.  This would be useful to people planning to do interviews, to avoid their duplicating the work of someone else.  Submissions to this database naturally would be voluntary, but perhaps people would be willing to participate and fill out some sort of web-based form.
 
I view the importance of the above three tasks as:  1. Task 1; 2. Task 3; 3. Task 2.
 
Perhaps an existing archival entity would be willing to take on the task of creating and operating the capabilities described here.  If not, perhaps some individual would be willing to do it, if he or she had the cooperation of the computer history community.