The National Library of Australia holds over 55,000 hours of oral history and folklore recordings dating back to the 1950s. This collection is being made available online, and many recordings can now be listened to using Trove’s audio player.

However, the oral history collection is not easy to find in Trove. You need to go the ‘Music, Audio, & Video’ category and check the ‘Sound/Interview, lecture, talk’ format facet. To limit results to oral histories that have been digitised, you can add “nla.obj” to your query and set the ‘Access’ facet to ‘Online’. But what’s actually in the oral history collection and what can you do with it?

To help researchers explore and analyse the NLA’s oral history collection, I’ve added some notebooks to the Music, sound, and oral histories section of the GLAM Workbench:

• Harvest oral histories metadata – harvests metadata describing the NLA’s oral history collection from Trove and saves the results as a CSV file
• Save a list of oral history collections and projects – extracts a list of series from metadata describing oral histories held by the NLA and described in Trove
• Download summaries and transcripts from oral histories – download all the available transcripts and summaries from digitised oral histories available in Trove

There’s also a couple of associated datasets:

• NLA oral histories metadata
• List of NLA oral history collections and projects

The Trove Data Guide uses these datasets to create an overview of the collection. For example, here’s how the oral histories are distributed over time.

And here’s the top ten subjects of digitised oral histories.

The Trove Data Guide also includes information on the types of data from the oral histories and how you can access it.