University of Erfurt participates in new portal for the collection of eyewitness interviews

Project partners with their collection holdings are the largest oral history institutions in German, namely the University Library of the Free University of Berlin, the archive "Deutsches Gedächtnis" at the FernUniversität Hagen and the "Werkstatt der Erinnerung" at the "Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte" Hamburg. At the University of Erlangen, the portal is also being tested for a study on migration history. The Bavarian Archive for Speech Signals at the University of Munich provides long-term archiving and speech recognition, and the Chair of Media Informatics at the University of Bamberg supports the interfaces to standards data.

In future, they will bring together their collection of eyewitness interviews across institutions on the indexing and research platform and make them permanently available as research data in accordance with the FAIR principles for use, but also for supplementation by museums, universities or foundations. Researchers, but also the interested public, can search the interviews across the collection via filter and full text search. Registered users can view the audio or video files with subtitles and accompanying materials and annotate them in their workbooks.

The narrative oral history interviews are an important source for historians and other disciplines, but also for exhibitions and educational projects. However, they are scattered across many institutions and are difficult to find, often poorly indexed and only accessible on site. "Oral-History.Digital" now makes these interviews discoverable, accessible and re-usable as audiovisual research data. Differentiated access control protects the personal rights of the interviewees. Long-term archiving ensures the permanent availability of the files.

The gradual expansion and consolidation of "Oral-History.Digital" is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) until 2026. The project is integrated into the NDFI via the NFDI4Memory consortium.