Tech4Teach 2020

App State’s First Year Experience Librarian and University Archivist are partnering to start an oral history project focused on the student experience. The idea is to record audio interviews with students during their first year and again during their senior year. The student experience is underrepresented in university archives across the country which makes this project unique. Since the university is a site for the collective memory of the Mountaineer experience, this would also offer  a way to diversify the ideas and beliefs of App State and connect future student populations to a longer history of the Mountaineer experience, creating more of a sense of belonging. It would also complement first year students’ engagement with Belk Library as it would focus on Special Collections, where the interviews will be housed, and the library’s Technology Services department via usage of the library’s audio recording room. Beyond recording interviews and storing them, it is the hope of those developing the project that interviews could be used in other ways such as podcasts or as components of the larger First Year Seminar curriculum. A spring 2020 pilot is planned: the librarians will partner with another an FYS faculty member to add an oral history assignment to his course. Students will engage with external oral history recordings, attend a how to instruction session, and then pair up and record interviews with each other. This digital poster will focus on the plans that have been developed as well as the technology that will be used.