Virtual Oral/Aural History Archive (of California State University, Long Beach)
www.csulb.edu/voaha
Three hundred hours of original recordings from the Women's History, Labor History and Southern California area oral history collections are now available online in this ground-breaking Virtual Oral History Archive. It features the voices of activists and ordinary people, and documents life in the first half of the 20th century. Interviews have been broken into organic time segments, which are summarized, and assigned search terms. The user can listen to an entire tape, or can choose a specific segment. The site design affords the user several ways of locating material: by browsing the collections, working through the hierarchy, or searching for interview segments that match a search criterion specified by the user.
The labor history series include interviews with Southern California women garment workers, oil workers, (Chicano) furniture workers, and with the men who struggled to desegregate the IAM and Boilermakers unions in Los Angeles during World War II.
Sherna Berger Gluck
Department of History
California State University, Long Beach
sbgluck@csulb.edu