As part of Nebraska’s 150th birthday celebration, the Omaha Public Library will hold a “Nebraska Voices Reception” on Friday, March 24th at the W. Dale Clark Library.
The event will celebrate the inauguration of the Omaha StoryCorps Community Archive. Martha Grenzeback, Librarian 1, says these 137 StoryCorps interviews recorded in Omaha and Lincoln in 2015 will be archived there as well as at the American FolkLife Center at the Library of Congress, and they’ll soon be available for the public to listen to.
“The plan is for these interviews to be available for anyone who comes into the library. StoryCorps rules mean that they can’t be checked out or streamed online except for eight minute segments, so people will have to come into the library. And eventually, my hope is that they will all be in our catalog with short extracts available for listening online, and then anyone who is interested can come into the library to listen to the whole interview.”
In addition to StoryCorps interview excerpts, excerpts from interviews done for the Junior League Oral History Project in the 1980s will also be played.
Grenzeback says the 2007 StoryCorps interviews, which were recorded as a project between StoryCorps and KIOS, are subject to different rules and are available for checkout on CD now.
For more information about this free event, which will include refreshments, the website is omahalibrary.org. Click the Events tab at the top and scroll down the left to find the 150th birthday celebration events.